Pre-hospital emergency care personnel’s challenges in providing care in mass casualty incidents: A qualitative study

•In the face of disasters and incidents with mass casualties, pre-hospital EMS personnel experience challenges which can influence their professional performance.•A qualitative approach was adopted to discover the challenges faced by pre-hospital EMS personnel in MCI and obtain an in-depth understanding of their problems.•It is not possible to realize these challenges without understanding the experiences of EMS personnel of providing care to victims in MCI incidents. Thus, the researchers used a qualitative approach to investigate pre-hospital EMS personnel’s challenges in providing care in MCI. In incidents with mass casualties, pre-hospital emergency medical services personnel (prehospital EMS personnel) face challenges that can impact their management of the scene and, by extension, their professional performance. The present study investigated the challenges faced by prehospital EMS personnel in mass casualty incidents in the south of Iran. This is a qualitative-descriptive study. The subjects were selected via purposeful sampling. Accordingly, 23 prehospital EMS personnel were interviewed in 23 semi-structured, individual, in-depth interviews. Graneheim and Lundman’s method was used to collect the data. Three themes and eight subthemes emerged from the qualitative data analysis. The three main themes were challenges related to professional capabilities, challenges related to organizational management inefficiency, and challenges related to lack of effective inter-organizational coordination and cooperation in crisis management. The challenges faced by prehospital EMS personnel in mass casualty incidents encompasses challenges related to professional capabilities, challenges related to organizational management inefficiency, and challenges related to lack of effective inter-organizational coordination and cooperation in crisis management. The results of this study can be used by senior medical emergency services managers to identify the challenges of pre-hospital emergency care personnel in mass casualty incidents and take the necessary measures to eliminate them to improve the quality of pre-hospital care in mass casualty incidents.