A Predictive Research on the Posttraumatic Improvement of Emergency Health Employees

Selahattin Avşarolu

doi:10.5539/ies.v12n6p94

Abstract

Traumatic incidents are defined as despair people are in when they face fears, weaknesses and vulnerabilities. The purpose of the present research is determining the mental problems faced by emergency health workers while performing their jobs and how they deal with these problems. For this purpose, “The Hopelessness Scale, Locus of Control Scale, Problem Solving Inventory, Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, Post Traumatic Growth Inventory, Peritraumatic Dissociative Experiences Questionnaire, The Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale and Beck Depression Inventory were used as data collection tools. The present research was designed in accordance with general screening model, which is a descriptive research method. With this model, how the independent variable affected the dependent variable was investigated and the regression analysis was conducted for the relationship between the variables. The research was carried out on the employees of the Department of Emergency Health Services in Erzincan and data were collected from 400 emergency health workers. The statistical analysis of the data was done by SPSS 20.00 package program and .05 was taken as the significance level. According to the regression analysis results hopelessness, negative effects of events on life, social support and dissociation were significantly related with stress symptoms and depressive mood levels. It was found that the effects of event and dissociation predict posttraumatic stress symptoms positively; and social support negatively. It was observed that hopelessness and post-traumatic stress symptoms predicted the level of depression positively and social support negatively. According to the findings of the research, it was recommended that psychosocial support units may be useful in emergency health services and psycho-education and psychological counseling services provided by the psychosocial unit can be useful for the stress, posttraumatic stress disorder and other problems that may be experienced.

Highlights

Traumatic incidents are when people face their fears, helplessness, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and are deeply affected
Incident Effect Sub-scale, Incident Severity Sub-scale, Peri-traumatic Dissociative Experiences Questionnaire-R, Hopelessness Scale, Problem Solving Inventory, Locus of Control Scale and Perceived Social Support Scale were included as independent variables in the first and second regression analyses, in which Post-traumatic Stress Symptoms Scale was used as the dependent variable
In the first regression analysis on female participants with the post-traumatic stress symptoms as the dependent variable, it was calculated as R=.556 (F(7, 177)=11.320, p

Summary

Introduction

Traumatic incidents are when people face their fears, helplessness, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and are deeply affected. According to DSM V (2013) trauma refers to exposure to death, serious injuries or sexual assault or threats from one or more ways listed below: (1) experiencing traumatic events directly, (2) personally witnessing while the events happen to others, (3) learning that a close family member or close friend experienced traumatic events-in the case that when a family member or a friend experiences death or death risk, the incidents involve violence or result from accidents, (4) repeated or excessive exposure to disturbing details of traumatic events. The criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (Brewin & Holmes, 2003) and the diagnosis of acute stress disorder (Horowitz, Wilner, & Alvarez, 1979) are prerequisites, some people who suffer from significant post-traumatic stress are less likely to be diagnosed with stress disorder (Baysak, 2010; Briere & Scott, 2016; Cohen & Murch, 1996)

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