Paramedic Services Week - Friends family and personal relations

For the final day of Paramedic Services Week we celebrate the friends, family, and personal relations among professional paramedics. These are the people who support individual paramedics and their work everywhere. They, perhaps more than any other factor, help us help you.

Colleagues, friends, and family of Frontenac Paramedic Michael Pasch on the occasion of his last call after more than 30 years in paramedicine, May 2023. Paramedicine is a challenging and rewarding career but it can come with higher than baseline rates of burnout and post-traumatic stress. Frontenac Paramedics, like most paramedic services, provide multiple formal supports for emotional- and mental-health hygiene and treatment among paramedics but experience, intuition, and research shows what a strong effect social support has on mental health.

Frontenac Paramedics DCs Dean and Marc pay a social visit with Kate, Maggie, Pat, and Rosie - the Joslin family - after Maggie and Rosie dressed as an ambulance with paramedic and a doctor for Halloween, November 2022.

The informal support and validation that comes from positive familial relationships, friendships, personal and professional partnerships, and interpersonal connections built through outside interests make all the difference.

Supt. van Hartingsveldt at the barbershop with Frontenac Paramedics friends and colleagues after donating his moustache of more than 30 years to a charitable cause, December 2021.

Friends and colleagues from Frontenac Paramedics, Kingston Central Ambulance Communications Centre, Kingston Police, and more at the Kingston Emergency Services Ride for Pride, June 2023.

Frontenac Paramedics and their families in the Walk to End ALS, June 2021.

So, you see, everyone - paramedics and otherwise - who supports each individual paramedic whether they know it or not, helps us help you.

Three-year-old Jude Leyton rests in hospital after returning to his family from three-and-a-half days lost and alone in South Frontenac, April 2021.