Occupational factors influencing paramedic health & wellbeing: A scoping review

Introduction: Health and wellbeing is essential to perform professionally and personal-ly. The demanding workload and high-pressure nature of the paramedic professionundoubtedly have an influence on health and wellbeing; however, the individualvariance and factors associated with this are poorly understood. The objective ofthis review is to identify what is known about the occupational factors that influenceparamedic health and wellbeing and to make recommendations on how to improveworking conditions and promote the health and wellbeing of the paramedic work-force.Methods: The Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) approach was used to perform a scoping re-view to assess the availability of literature dating from January 2003 to January 2023.Keywords including paramedic*, emergency medical technician*, first responder*,influence* OR perception*, health, wellbeing were input into the OVID, PsycINFO,and PubMed databases. Titles and abstracts were reviewed by two independent au-thors, and inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied. The remaining articles werereviewed in full text by two authors, and conflicts were managed by the primaryauthor.Results: The search of the electronic databases identified 314 articles. Of these, 33 in-formed the results of the review. The search highlighted paramedics' poor reportablelevels of health compared to other occupations. An analysis identified key themesemerging from the literature including (1) shift work, (2) mental health issues, (3) ex-posure to critical incidents, and (4) the influence of the profession on physical activityand ailment.Conclusion: A paramedic's occupation significantly influences the individual's healthand is associated with an increased incidence of reportable illness and injury. Thereview concluded insufficient data to identify the paramedic's personal perception ofthe influences on their health and wellbeing. There is little understanding of why theparamedic has poor reportable levels of health, which would be invaluable formingpreventative and supportive approaches