Emergency Incident Affects The Emotional And Physical Performance Of Emergency Management Personnel

Minimal attention in the emergency management community has focused on the secondary victims to emergency incidents, specifically the responders and emergency service workers who attend to the demands of emergencies and disasters. It is important to consider the well-being of emergency management personnel because when a disaster strikes in their community, they become victim-responders. Their commitment will be to what they need to do for their job and community, but their minds and hearts could be preoccupied on emergency incidents that affect their emotional and physical fitness. The first half of this paper will provide an overview of how an emergency incident affects the emotional and physical fitness of emergency management personnel. The second half of the paper provides the definition of a program evaluation, and its purpose in the National Incident Management System (NIMS).

Impacts of Emergency Incidents

When firefighters and emergency medical service (EMS) personnel are on a call to render aid, they sometimes become blindsided by events occurring around them. An emergency incident that involves violence can take a

Many emergency management personnel develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), after critical incidents when responders have experienced or witnessed an event that involved death or injury. PTSD symptoms can include re-experiencing the event through flashbacks, similar calls, sights, smells, or other triggers that can bring the responder back to the original event. This can create a dangerous situation for coworkers, the responder, and their families. Emergency incidents can also cause sleep deprivation for emergency management personnel. Sleep deprivation may physically predispose an individual to becoming a stress