Diseño de un programa de evaluación e intervención de variables emocionales, conductuales y personales para personal de emergencias

Abstract

The actual geopolitical and economic structure has given place to a social and occupational situation which involves new risks for workers (Sennett, 2000, 2001, 2006, 2009, 2011), deriving from the global context, of inestability and persistent pressoure in employment and the demands of the job, which the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has classified as a psychosocial risk. At the same time, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared that the new professional diseases, amongst which they attach great importance to stress, depression and anxiety, are the epidemic of the 21st century. Above all, we must underline that the growing interest in occupational and “psychological well being” has propitiated a great advance in the investigation into these disorders, making workers and also institutions aware of the need to implement programmes for prevention, evaluation, formation, information and intervention in the hope of improving the standart of life as much on a personal, as on occupational and social level. On the other hand, the current global context of events and the increase in new technologies, have made it evident that the consequent new risks represent a threat to personal safety, to personal property and the environment in which we move and, due to their complexity, they are disordered and difficult to control. And this means, that what may occur outside of our own community can extend or can cause an affect in a direct or indirect way on our immediate surroundings, such being the case during large scale disasters or terrorist attacks, amongst other matters. This fact has made many different communities, as much on a national level as on international level, reorganise and analyse new tactics to be able to face up to this kind of treats which we will see throughout this study. Security and defense are complementary terms that we will analyse in this study, as well as the essential framework necessary for the development of safety duties within emergency settings. Within this structure the nation´s security forces, on a governmental level and also some non-governmental organizations, make up the sector of professionals and volunteers involved in the resolution of situations considered to be of a high risk, a threat, or an emergency for the population. While there are still few investigations in the emergency field, we consider that the importance of this study lies in providing a practical view of interventions in emergencies. In the theoretical revisión, we will initially broach some of the behavioural variables of the emergency personal and their relation to psychosocial, motivational and organizational variables, focusing our attention on the reponses of greater risk, anxiety and stress, that are considered to be conducts of high psychosocial risk. This involves at the same time, an analysis of the environment where these conducts develop with the aim of canalizing this type of conflicts within a global context. On these lines, the current clinical and strategic intervention in case of emergency centre, in the first place, on maintaining a balance between the resources on hand, and the needs of the people and on the analysis of the demands and opportunities of the environment, giving rise to new ways of confronting hazardous situations as much as on, an individual level as on a communitarian scale. As for the behavioural variables, starting with the pioneering works of Selye (1936, 1960, 1974) in relation to the physiological reponse to stress, we have reviewed Lazarus` model (1986) which considers stress to be a coping process (adaptive or not adaptive, effective or not effective), that does not always bear any relation to the results, as these depend in greater part on the context. At a later date, Carver and Scheier (1994) presented two kinds of confrontation, defining situational coping as relating to the changes in our surroundings and, dispositional coping as based on two components designated as manners of coping and coping strategies. And finally, Lazarus` studies and Moo`s Works on coping have been the main crux of this investigation because of his integral visión of the person and its context within an emergency framework. With regard to motivational variables, the pioneering works of McClelland, Atkinson, Clark and Lowell (1953), in this field with their studies published as “The Achievement Motive”, maked an advance in cognitive and social sciencies. In the same way, R.H. Moos (2005), underlines the role of a social atmosphere for personal satisfaction, identifying the principle factors of the working atmosphere as organizational development, in occupational health and in productivity. Nowadays we regard as “intelligent organizations” the institutions that provide an open system in which their members as well as mixing socially can develop their creative and learning abilities (Senge, 1992, 1995, 2014). Finally, without entering into personal evaluation or personal judgement, we have thougtht it important to offer some patterns of coping, as much at a personal level as at a communitarian level, from the point of view of positive psychology, such as systemic thinking, resilience and post-traumatic growth , with works by noteworthy authors such as Siegrist (1996), Grotberg (1998, 2001), Folkman and Moskowith (2000), Calhoun and Tedeschi (2001), Seligman (2003), Zuckerfeld and Zonis (2006), Cyrulnik (2007), Leka and Cox (2010), and Wollin (2010), amongst others, and also the UNESCO´S proposal with regard to education for emergencies, as the main coping strategy. The second part of this work centres on the analysis and statistics treatment of coping responses used by a representative simple of emergency staff. For this matter we have review a several scales of measurement worked by different authors, for example Folkman and Lazaru´s “Scale of Coping Modes” (1980), Carver, Scheier and Weintraub´s COPE Inventary (1989), CSI by Tobin, Holroyd and Reynolds (1984,1989) and R.H. Moos CRIA (1993), amongst others. In this context, the objetives set out in the present study are those which seek to validate a series of hypotheses capable of forming a highly practical point of view with regard to the profile of the emergency personnel and the strategies most used by the professionals who intervene in emergencies, whit the purpose of presenting or validating an effective and flexible instrument that will let us establish the most appropiate confrontational strategies for the procedures of selection, formation and intervention of emergency personnel. Summing, our main endeavour is directed at proportioning an overall view of the professionals who deal with emergencies in relation to the context in which their task evolves, focusing our attention on the factors of occupational stress that affect their health and their psychological well-being, on a personal and social level, at work and within the family and, how these factors can be dealt with in the most efficacious manner by the person intervening and by the organization.