Mausz, J.; D’Eath, J.; Jackson, N.A.; Johnston, M.; Batt, A.M.; Donnelly, E.A. Sexist, Racist, and Homophobic Violence against Paramedics in a Single Canadian Site. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health2024, 21, 505.
Mausz, J.; D’Eath, J.; Jackson, N.A.; Johnston, M.; Batt, A.M.; Donnelly, E.A. Sexist, Racist, and Homophobic Violence against Paramedics in a Single Canadian Site. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2024, 21, 505.
Mausz, J.; D’Eath, J.; Jackson, N.A.; Johnston, M.; Batt, A.M.; Donnelly, E.A. Sexist, Racist, and Homophobic Violence against Paramedics in a Single Canadian Site. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health2024, 21, 505.
Mausz, J.; D’Eath, J.; Jackson, N.A.; Johnston, M.; Batt, A.M.; Donnelly, E.A. Sexist, Racist, and Homophobic Violence against Paramedics in a Single Canadian Site. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2024, 21, 505.
Abstract
Violence against paramedics is widely recognized as a serious, but underreported, problem. While injurious physical attacks on paramedics are generally reported, non-physical violence is less likely to be documented. Verbal abuse can be very distressing, particularly if the harassment targets personal or cultural identities, such as race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. Leveraging a novel, point-of-event reporting process, our objective was to estimate the prevalence of harassment on identity grounds against paramedics in a single paramedic service in Ontario, Canada, and assess its potentially differential impact on emotional distress. In an analysis of 502 reports filed between February 1, 2021, through February 28, 2022, two paramedic-supervisors independently coded the free-text narrative descriptions of violent encounters for themes suggestive of sexism, racism, and homophobia. We achieved high interrater agreement across the dimensions (k=0.73-0.83), and after resolving discrepant cases, we found that 1 in 4 violent reports documented abuse on at least one of the identity grounds. In these cases, paramedics were 60% more likely to indicate being emotionally distressed than for other forms of violence. Our findings offer unique insight into the type of vitriol paramedics experience in the course of their work and its potential for psychological harm.
Keywords
paramedics; emergency medical services; Eemergency medical technicians; violence; racism; sexism; homophobia
Subject
Public Health and Healthcare, Public, Environmental and Occupational Health
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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