The Social Organization of Mental Health and Resiliency – Institutional Ethnographic Explorations of Burnout on the Front-Lines of Emergency Medical Services in Alberta, Canada

With a population of over 4 million individuals, Alberta paramedics respond to over a half a million emergency or transfer calls on an annual basis. This equates to over 1300 calls a day, 57 calls every hour, and nearly one call every minute. However, Emergency Medical Services in Alberta have reached a breaking point, with numerous news reports drawing attention to various issues currently facing paramedics in Alberta. This paper-presentation explores the anatomy of a crisis by drawing on two institutional ethnographic studies on EMS in Alberta. Taken together, this paper-presentation explicates the anatomy of a crisis by ethnographically exploring how paramedics’ experience of the current crisis is socially organized or “take[s] the form that it does” (McCoy, 2006, pp. 112, 116) by ongoing social and historical processes. In doing so, this paper-presentation offers an alternative perspective on burnout in the health professions by moving beyond bio-psycho-medico approach to looking at how one’s work shapes the “everyday” of the “burnout” epidemic.