Developing coping strategies to address the causes and contributors of EMS burnout.
Framing the barriers to personal resilience
Austin’s EMS department had suffered from multiple suicides and was experiencing a high turnover rate. Upstream was engaged to identify the root causes and contributors of burnout. We engaged EMS personnel in contextual inquiry that included ride alongs, in-depth dialogue and journaling. The insight gained was leveraged to develop a framework describing the barriers to emotional resilience over several time horizons. Using the framework, we worked with Austin’s Office of Innovation to identify scenarios by day, week and career that lead to emotional stress and burnout.
Identifying solutions to improve personal resilience
Leveraging these scenarios, we worked with the Office of Innovation and EMS department to identify and design unique coping mechanisms to reduce daily and weekly stresses of the job. For example, the birth of a child during a career requires a different coping strategy than a service call that puts the provider’s life at risk. This enabled the Office of Innovation to match solutions to the right risk factors to reduce team turnover and increase resilience across the department.
Driving systemic changes to put strategies into practice
With solutions matched, we could then identify systemic changes required to put strategies into practice. Driven by the Office of Innovation and the EMS department, changes were made to laws, regulations, accreditations, organizational policy, procedures, programs and practices.
“Upstream’s work oriented the department to a new way to think about the challenge and their framework gave us the ability to filter and prioritize all of the suggestions within the department to those that could make the most impact in the lives of our EMS team members.”
- Chief Innovation Officer, City of Austin