Paramedic PapersHome Workforce & wellbeing Resilience as a skill, not a trait
Workforce & wellbeing
Resilience as a skill, not a trait
Ask the experts: a practitioner-centred approach to resilience in emergency medical services
European Journal of Psychotraumatology · 2026-10-20 · Added 22 October 2026
Semi-structured interviews with 20 Queensland paramedics and dispatchers framed frontline resilience as a trainable expert skill — a deliberately entered 'work mode' with preparation, containment and recovery phases — rather than a fixed trait.
- Study type
- Qualitative
- Design
- Qualitative reflexive thematic analysis
- Participants
- 20 Queensland paramedics and dispatchers (tenure 2–38 years)
- Main finding
- Three intensifiers (unpredictability, moral weight, personal threat) and three coping themes (baseline buffers, work mode, social scaffolding) emerged, with work mode showing features of skilled performance
- Caveat
- Small single-service sample analysed by the interviewers themselves
- Bottom line
- Context only
Why it matters in Australia (High relevance). Australian ambulance workforce research with direct implications for how wellbeing programs are designed and evaluated across services.
Learning goal
Build my capacity to treat resilience as a trainable skill through deliberate preparation, containment and recovery.
More
- Topic: Workforce & wellbeing
- Daily scan: 22 October 2026
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