Mental health and quality of services provided by the fire brigade: better understanding the potential levers for intervention at work

  • Nina is a second year master's student in psychology. Together with two colleagues, she founded the first anti-bullying committee in my school district. Throughout her university studies, she worked for social justice, notably as an active member in the committees to combat sexual crimes and violence and 2SLGBTQIA+ at the University of Moncton. Nina has experience researching the mental and physical health of children and young adults. Its main objective is to actively contribute to improving the mental and physical health of various marginalized communities in Canada.

This research project, in collaboration with the City of Moncton Fire Department, highlights the mental health of firefighters facing new contemporary challenges related to their profession.

With the increase in first responder interventions, moving from medical emergencies to intervention with people experiencing homelessness, it is essential to better understand the effect of the increase in workload ( quantitative and qualitative) on mental health and the quality of the services provided. Thus, the present research aims in particular to examine the role of demands, as well as organizational resources, on the presence of symptoms of unhappiness and the quality of services provided to the population.

The study will be carried out with approximately 120 firefighters from five different fire stations in the Moncton region. This is a mixed design research including a quantitative and qualitative component, using validated scales and semi-structured interviews to collect complete data on the variables under study. Descriptive, correlational, regression and mediation analyzes will be carried out, in addition to thematic analysis of qualitative data.

Ultimately, this project will not only contribute to enriching knowledge on the mental health of firefighters, while contributing to developing and implementing an intervention that meets the targeted needs of firefighters in the City of Moncton.

This project is co-funded in partnership with Mitacs and iA Financial Group.