Violence Against Pre-hospital Emergency Medical Service Personnel in Guilan Province, Iran: A Cross-Sectional Study

The first contact between emergency patients and medical services is carried out by emergency medical services (EMS). EMS personnel must deliver high-quality and high-speed services. This condition might cause high levels of stress and violence in the patients and their companions.

In this research, we aimed to study the violent acts against pre-hospital EMS personnel in Guilan Province, Iran.

This research was a cross-sectional study. A total of 110 EMS personnel working in Guilan Province in the north of Iran were selected using a random selection method between March and June 2020. A researcher-made questionnaire was used to collect the study data from the EMS personnel. The results were analyzed by the Poisson regression.

A total of 144 questionnaires were sent to the personnel, of these 110 were completed. The mean age of the participants was 34.89±3.65 years and all of them were male. About 61.8% of the samples experienced some kind of physical or verbal violence in the past 3 months. All cases of physical violence were perpetrated by men and half of them were done by close relatives of the patients. A significant relationship was found between the marital status of the EMS personnel and the number of physical violence they experienced (β=2.246, 95% CI; 0.058 to 4.446, P=0.032). In addition, the number of experienced physical violence was higher in those staff who worked at road EMS services compare to city or town EMS services (β=1.519,95% CI; 0.092 to 2.934, P=0.001). According to the EMS personnel, most of the attacks were answered calmly. The personnel revealed that the most important reason for not reporting physical violence was the futility of reports and the lack of guidelines for reporting violence.

The findings of this study confirm that pre-hospital EMS are at high risk of workplace violence in Guilan Province which highly affects their health and well-being. Training EMS personnel and strengthening their communication skills are important factors in reducing violence against emergency services technicians.