Serving Those Who Serve

Research into the mental health of first responders is a necessary step to improve the well-being of those who serve on the front lines. Paramedicine pioneer Dr . Ron Stewart and former volunteer firefighter Robin Campbell are leading the way

By Rachel Cooper (’89)

We know too well the toll that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can take on the welfare of first responders, their families and their communities. Today, solid research is being done to alleviate this, and young researchers such as Robin Campbell (’08, ’13) are contributing to that work.

Campbell, who joined the Wolfville Fire Department as an Acadia undergraduate in Recreation Management and served as a volunteer firefighter for 10 years, is now a PhD candidate at Dalhousie University. Her thesis, called “Sound the Siren,” is on the mental health needs of volunteer firefighters and other first responders in Nova Scotia – a research journey she is sharing on her soundthesiren. ca website. Campbell is also an associate researcher with Firewell (firewell.ca), a health and wellness online community for Canadian firefighters.

“Training as a firefighter took me down a path I didn’t expect,” Campbell says. “As I experienced different things myself as a firefighter and saw what other firefighters were dealing with regarding their health and wellness, I became interested in what is happening to firefighters, especially those who volunteer.”

Yet, until 1993, Nova Scotia had no coordinated emergency health service or 911 phone system in place. In fact, about 50 per cent of the ambulances were provided by morticians. Something needed to change – and in 1993, it did.

First paramedic program

The person behind that change was Dr. Ron Stewart (’63, ’65, DSc ’88). During the 1970s and 1980s, Stewart was the first medical director of a paramedic program in the United States, in Los Angeles. He and his team trained more than 1,800 paramedics for the streets of LA. He had a close relationship with the students, about 90 per cent of whom were from fire departments, and saw that many of them had serious psychological problems, reflected in high divorce rates, illness, and even suicidal ideation and attempts. By the 1980s, 80 per cent of the calls to the fire department were medical calls, yet most firefighters were unprepared for dealing with life and death situations and decisions.

“Even more than that, some 40 per cent of those working in emergency services were Vietnam veterans, and those folks were scarred,” he says. “I knew something was going on, but it was pre-PTSD. We didn’t have a diagnosis.”

Robin Campbell (’08, ’13)

He hired two psychologists and eventually convinced the LA fire service that it was in its best interest to study the students going through the curriculum and to provide counselling. Throughout the rest of Stewart’s career, the mental health of first responders has been high on his list of priorities.

After 20 years of researching and developing the delivery of effective emergency-health services in other jurisdictions, Stewart returned home to Nova Scotia. In 1993, he ran in the provincial election in his home riding in Cape Breton. “The only way I could see the changes needed in Nova Scotia was through government,” he says. “I had no experience whatsoever in politics, but I saw the problems with the quality of health care.”

Stewart served as Minister of Health from 1993 to 1996 and accomplished what he set out to do: the provincial government taking control of ground ambulance operations and consolidating them into the Emergency Health Services. “When we designed the Nova Scotia EHS system, significant attention had to be paid by the provider to the mental health of the paramedic workers,” he says.

The CUSO experience

Back in 1959, when Stewart arrived at Acadia, he was the first in his family to graduate from high school and the only member of his graduating class to attend university.

“I chose Acadia specifically because, when I visited there, it had a sense of community,” he says. He did a BA in languages and music then switched to biology and completed a BSc two years later. He also won a scholarship from CUSO, the Canadian University Service Overseas, that took him to the Arctic and a project related to hemoglobin levels in Inuit children. “That was the first realization that I felt I could do something for a community,” he says.

Even before that, another CUSO scholarship took him to Algeria in 1965, shortly after it had won independence from France. The poverty he witnessed opened his eyes, and working in the aftermath of a bomb that killed about 1,000 people, and the uncertainty of a country still at war, made him want to pursue a career in critical care and emergency medicine. He applied to Dalhousie Medical School the following year.

“Acadia was where everything started because of those scholarships,” he says.

Over the years, Stewart has won awards too numerous to catalogue here . They include the Order of Canada, the Order of Nova Scotia, and Hero of Emergency Medicine by the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Now he is working with Acadia’s Department of Psychology on a major project on the mental health of first responders, using the community of Cape Breton Island medics as a study group.

“I’m having a wonderful, wonderful life,” he says, “and part of it is due to my continual association with Acadia. I have a great ally in Acadia.”

Coming full circle

For Campbell, her ties to Acadia remain unbroken. As she pursues her PhD, she works as a lecturer in Acadia’s Department of Community Development.

“It’s almost like a full circle – being a student and now a faculty member,” she says. “Acadia, the department or the University as a whole, had that philosophy around being part of the community and giving back. If I hadn’t gone to Acadia, I would never have joined the fire department and I would never have been on the path that I’m on.”