Analysis of socio-demographic, lifestyle and psychosocial risk factors among a sample of Portuguese emergency medical technicians

Abstract

Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT’s) are exposed to a large diversity of situations and have constantly to adapt their actions to the circumstances that they face, making this profession very demanding in several aspects. This paper focuses on analysing the psychosocial risk factors among these professionals, based on the socio-demographic characteristics and lifestyle variables. This study was built on a cross-sectional questionnaire that comprised socio-demographic characteristics, variables related with lifestyle and the Portuguese Medium Version of Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire II (COPSOQ II). The sample included 51 Emergency Medical Technicians from the Portuguese National Institute of Medical Emergency (INEM). The average age of the sample was 35.7 years and 70.6% of it were male professionals. The COPSOQ II showed critical values in the scales “Cognitive demands” and “Emotional demands”, being worse in the “South (Lisbon and Faro)” region. The scales “Offensive behaviours”, “Sleeping troubles”, “Meaning of work”, “Role clarity” and “Social community at work” presented favourable outputs. As age increased, health perception was better, but the “Mutual trust between employees” deteriorated. People with obesity have worse results in the scales “Cognitive demands”, “Possibilities of development”, “Commitment to the workplace”, “Predictability” and “Social support from colleagues”. Although it is difficult to manage unpredictability and high emotional demands due to the nature of this career, some organizational dimensions have room to improve, performing as protective health factors and mediators of mental health.