A Digital Resilience Intervention for Emergency Medical Service Workers

Emergency medical service (EMS) workers (i.e., ambulance service providers) experience triple the risk for anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) compared to the general U.S. population. These mental disorders impact health and well-being across the life course. Thus, there is a critical need for interventions targeting key risk factors that can reduce EMS workers' mental health risk. Chronic stress represents such a risk factor and is a routine feature of the EMS profession due to the demands of providing emergency medical care. Self-Reflective Resilience-Recovery Activity Promotion Training (SRR-RAPT) promotes finding positive meaning in stressors by building self-awareness of the coping and regulatory responses used to manage them; evaluating those responses; adapting them based upon their perceived effectiveness; and developing a plan for managing similar stressors in the future based on what can be learned from the current situation. In addition to prompting self-monitoring and active reflection on stressors and coping responses, SRR-RAPT encourages practicing recovery activities that permit a person's stressor induced strain level to return to baseline. The primary objective of the current study is to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability, and adoptability of SRR-RAPT among EMS personnel. A secondary objective was to examine the intervention's effect on hypothesized mechanisms of action predicted to vary in response to the intervention, as well as consider the intervention's ability to reduce mental health symptoms. It is hypothesized that the intervention will be associated with more positive meaning made, adaptive self-reflection, recovery activities, and recovery experiences, as well as lower levels of mental health symptoms.