prevalence and related factors of post-traumatic stress disorder in emergency medical technicians; a cross-sectional study

Introduction: ongoing exposure to a variety of pre-hospital emergencies (pe) has placed emergency medical technicians (emts) at serious psychiatric compromise such as post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd). the present study aimed to evaluate the prevalence and associated factors of ptsd among emts.methods: this prospective cross-sectional study was conducted on emts in the emergency medical services (ems) in west of iran. a baseline information questionnaire including personal work-related characteristics and the ptsd checklist of dsm-5 (pcl-5) were used for data collection. non-parametric tests and multivariate linear regression were used to evaluate the associated factors of ptsd in these participants.results: among the participants, 22% of technicians had ptsd-diagnostic criteria. the mean total pcl-5 score was 21.60 ± 11.45, while the scores were 38.02 ± 6.08 and 17.47 ± 8.36 in the ptsd-diagnosed and undiagnosed groups, respectively. the most common symptom of the clusters was negative alterations in cognition with a mean score of 7.42 ± 4.63. after adjusting confounders, the number of missions (t= 2.50, p= 0.013), work experience (t= -3.24, p= 0.001) and number of shifts (t: 26.38, p < 0.001) were significantly corelated with pcl-5 score.conclusion: the results indicated that the prevalence of ptsd among emts personnel of hamadan province is high. emts with the age of ≤ 30 years, work experience of ≤ 10 years, married status, informal employment, emergency medical technician's degree, and more than 8 shifts per month, as well as no previous training history had a higher total pcl-5 score.