Air medical program merger and stress

Introduction: How does the stress of a program merger affect job stress in air medical transport? Methods: This study was an anonymous survey of 104 transport personnel in a Midwestern critical care transport program with merged air and ground components. Tools included the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS), which quantitates stressful life events on a weighted scale that allows summation as a score, and the Medical Personnel Stress Survey (MPSS), which quantitates work stress in four categories: organizational stress (OS) related to work environment, frustration/exhaustion (FE) related to patient care, job satisfaction (JS) related to decreased self-worth, and psychosomatic complaints (PC), stress manifested as personal illness. Statistical analysis was performed with a variety of tools. Results: Fifty of 104 personnel responded completely. The average SRRS was low at 130.9; only 20% had scores above 200. No significant differences in MPSS occurred in personnel with high and low SRRS scores. Additionally, the SRRS correlated weakly with OS (r = −0.297, P < 0.05). Within the MPSS, OS correlated with FE and JS (r = 0.493, P = 0.0005; r = −0.593, P < 0.0001) and FE correlated with JS (r = −0.36, P = 0.01). Conclusion: The overall personnel stress levels in this air medical program with merged air and ground components were low and appeared to be unrelated to organizational stress. This finding may be a result in part of the careful attention paid to stress and the elimination of stressors during the merger process.