Emotional Aspects of Prehospital Paediatric Care
Date: Thursday 26th May 2022
Many years ago, the first cardiac arrest I attended as a Student Paramedic in my first year was a paediatric cardiac arrest. The experience taught me much about myself, the colleagues I worked with, but more importantly, the sheer power and influence of emotions in healthcare. Why is it that children and young people stir such intense passion and emotion in practitioners? Why do we find it challenging to provide care for this group of people?
In healthcare, to enhance individual performance and wider clinical practice, we give a great deal of attention, emphasis, and investment to improving our clinical knowledge and skills. This continues to be demonstrated by the education and training we may receive concerning children and young people. But does this approach sufficiently address the challenges we experience?
Non-clinical aspects of our performance and practice such as emotions arguably have a greater influence on our approach, interactions, and outcomes. This dynamic is particularly prominent in prehospital care, which is essentially about optimising the scene and environment, and interactions between people, to enable the medicine to take place.
With this understanding and experience in mind, I conducted a literature review to understand the challenges prehospital care practitioners experience with emotional aspects of paediatric care. This led to the development of what I call the ‘Emotional Cycle of Healthcare Provision', which I will use to present lessons learned from the literature review.
This Session is Sponsored by Zoll Medical Ltd.
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Wasim Ahmed (drBACKPACK), Paramedic
Wasim is a UK-based HCPC registered Paramedic with experiences in youth and voluntary work, public and community healthcare, event medicine, education, research, and prehospital care. His research interest in the emotional aspects of healthcare is a continuation of his academic background in the social and political sciences. Prior to completing a degree in Paramedic Science (BSc Hons) he undertook two further degrees. The first was in Geography with International Politics, where he developed a keen interest in children and young people, societies and cultures, and identity and wellbeing. These interests were developed further with an MSc (Hons) in Wellbeing in Public Policy and International Development, where he explored education and healthcare policy, visions and practices of human wellbeing, and Education in Emergencies (EiE, a growing field of International Disaster Management). After many years of experience in healthcare and drawing upon his background in the social and political sciences, he has found understanding and appreciation of non-clinical aspects of healthcare to be limited. He is therefore keen to raise awareness and enhance understanding around non-clinical aspects amongst fellow healthcare practitioners through his platform drBACKPACK.