What Resilience Skills Do Emergency Workers Need During a Widespread Phase of a Socio-Health Emergency? A Focus on the Role of Hardiness and Resilience

Emergency volunteers who intervene during disasters and emergency situations are subjected to risk to their psychological well-being. Experiencing highly stressful experiences can lead to developing secondary trauma and burnout. It is, therefore, important to know what protective factors can be strengthened in volunteers to protect their mental and social well-being. This study has the main objective of analyzing how the possible protective factors hardiness and resilience intervene in the relationship with emergency stress, secondary trauma, and burnout in a sample of 476 Italian Red Cross volunteers using an online transactional survey during the second phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pearson's correlation, several hierarchical linear regression models, and moderation analysis were conducted. The results showed a strong positive association between emergency stress, secondary trauma, and burnout, and their negative correlation with resilience skills. Furthermore, emergency stress and the avoidance of secondary trauma led to an increase in emotional exhaustion and depersonalization of emergency volunteers. During the emergency phases, hardiness played a greater protective role in burnout than resilience skills. Hardiness was found to be a good moderator of both emergency stress and avoidance and intrusion of secondary trauma. Connor-Davidson resilience showed a significant moderating effect between the components of secondary trauma and burnout. These results suggest the importance of implementing training in hardiness and resilience for emergency volunteers to reduce the risk of stress, secondary trauma, and burnout during a health emergency and improve their social well-being.