EMS Perspectives on Coping with Child Death in an Out-of-Hospital Setting

ABSTRACT

To understand the ways that EMS providers cope with pediatric death in an out-of-hospital setting, eight focus groups were conducted with 98 urban, rural, and suburban EMS providers. Sixty-eight of the participants also completed a short questionnaire about a specific event. In both the focus groups and questionnaire, participants were asked how they individually coped with the death, how they coped as a team, and what coping strategies were most and least helpful. Specific coping strategies were found to be helpful to EMS providers, and could be classified as Solve, Solace, Dismiss, and Escape based on whether they approached or avoided the problem or the emotion.

KEYWORDS:

• Coping
• EMS
• pediatric death
• traumatic events

Notes

¹The one large focus group, while outside the norm in terms of numbers usually included in a focus group methodology, was actually quite interactive and generated a rich set of answers to the questionnaire and focus group questions. However, the answers were in line with responses from other groups.