Secondary Traumatic Stress among Swedish Emergency Dispatchers : Symptoms and Consequences of Secondary Traumatic Stress

Sammanfattning: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a diagnosis given after the development of maladaptive behavior following exposure to traumatic events. This is the first quantitative study regarding the Swedish emergency dispatching population (n = 97) and posttraumatic (secondary traumatic) stress. The main research question for this study was: “How prevalent are clinically significant posttraumatic stress symptoms among Swedish emergency dispatchers?”; the secondary research question formed became: “What relationship, if any, can be found between the prevalence of clinically significant posttraumatic stress symptoms and other psychological ailments such as depression and burnout?”. The study used a digital questionnaire containing the screening tests ProQoL, MADRS-S and PCL-C to examine the prevalence of symptomology among dispatchers. The participants answers are then analyzed using correlation matrices, one sample t-tests, reliability analyses and descriptives to identify correlations, prevalence rates and other statistically significant items. 57 of the 97 respondents (58.8%) reported symptoms that were above the cutoff to suspect moderate PTSD, 50 of the 97 respondents (51.5%) reported symptoms that were above the cutoff to suspect mild depression and 76 of the 97 respondents (76.3%) reported symptoms that were above the cutoff to suspect burnout. The study concludes that there is an elevated prevalence of PTSD symptoms among Swedish emergency dispatchers (Student’s t = 3.85, Cohen’s d = 0.391, p <.001) and that these symptoms are significantly and positively correlated to symptoms of burnout (r = 0.740, p < .001) and depression (r = 0.820, p < .001).