BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Public Mental Health
This article is part of the Research TopicPathways to Mental Health Resilience in Emergency Personnel: Protective Strategies and Occupational ChallengesView all 22 articles
Mental Health & Resilience in Crews of Emergency Medical Service Helicopters (HEMS) - load analysis of stressful missions
Provisionally accepted
- DRF Stiftung Luftrettung gGmbH, Filderstadt, Germany
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Crews of rescue transport helicopters (RTH) are repeatedly confronted with difficult missions and operational scenarios. When dealing with and processing difficult missions in particular, PSNV services (PSNV – psychosocial emergency care) are rarely taken up. Even actively offered assistance is usually declined, regardless of who makes the offer. To investigate the number of potential stressful missions, e.g. pediatric patients with NACA-score 5-7, suicide or suicide attempts, second victim aspect or critical incidents, and the use of PSNV at the DRF Luftrettung were analzyed using systematically generated data over a two-year-period. 1383 missions were extracted from the data. Overall, 4 contacts of reaching out for help and support could be identified. Corresponding to the literature, the data suggests that crews do not feel the need to be supported to overcome difficult missions despite the debriefing in the crew. It leads to the assumption that the feeling of safety, respect and teamwork provides a great resource in dealing with burdensome missions. But it must also be discussed that maybe there exists a number of unrecorded cases. For that, further research in qualitative design of resources and challenges for the resilience and mental health of the crews of emergency medical service helicopters is needed to get better understanding of the phenomenon and support the emergency-personnel's well-being and human performance.
Keywords: burdensome operations, HEMS (Helicopter Emergency Medical Service), Mental Health, Peer-support, resilience
Received: 15 Dec 2025; Accepted: 06 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Ziehr, Kramer and Pracz. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sabrina Ziehr
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