Lunch and Learn

Revisiting Your PTSD Prevention Plans. Refining and Evolving for Today’s Challenges

Colleagues, Partners, and Supporters,

You are invited to join us for a powerful and collaborative days focused on strengthening paramedic wellness across Ontario. 

Join the Ontario Paramedic Association Wellness Committee (OPAWC) on May 28, 2026, for our second Community of Practice Forum: “Revisiting Your PTSD Prevention Plans: Refining and Evolving for Today’s Challenges.”

This dynamic forum is designed to bring together Paramedic Wellness Coordinators, Peer Support Team Leaders, service leaders, vendors, and sponsors from across the province. Together, we will create a space to connect, share, and build stronger, more effective PTSD prevention strategies.

OPAWC Community of Practice Forum – Revisiting Your PTSD Prevention Plans

Why Attend? 

 This session moves beyond theory and into real-world application. Participants are encouraged to bring their current PTSD Prevention Plans and evaluate them against the Consolidated Report developed during our previous forum: “Sharing Strategies on How to Protect and Improve Paramedic Wellness.”

Through expert insights and collaborative discussion, you will:

1. Gain practical strength from leaders in paramedic wellness
2. Engage in facilitated roundtable discussions in partnership with the Publics Service s Health & Safety Association (PSHSA)
3. Strengthen and refine your organization's PTSD Prevention Plan
4. Build meaningful connections with peers, vendors and system partners

Opportunities for Vendors & Sponsors 

 We warmly welcome vendors and sponsors who are committed to supporting paramedic mental health and wellness. This forum offers a unique opportunity to:

1. Showcase innovative products and services
2. Connect directly with decision-makers and wellness leaders
3. Contribute to meaningful change within paramedic Services

Event Details:

📅 Date: May 28, 2026

🕗 Time: 08:00 – 16:00

📍 Location: York Region’s Community Safety Village (Bruce Mills Conservation Area)

3291 Stouffville Rd, Whitchurch-Stouffville, ON L4A 7X5

🍽️ Lunch is included

Registration:

1. $25 – OPA Members
2. $45 - Non-OPA Members

Click here to purchase tickets and vendor tables, or to sponsor the event.

We look forward to bringing together passionate professionals and partners dedicated to advancing paramedic wellness. Your voice, experience, and collaboration are essential as we continue this important work.

Warm regards,

Ontario Paramedic Association Wellness Committee (OPAWC)

Together we can strengthen systems that support those who serve on the front lines

For more information, please contact wellness@ontarioparamedic.ca.

Agenda (subject to change)

Speaker Biographies and Presentation Abstracts

David Wolff, BClinPrac, MAdEd, EdD, A-EMCA, CMM III (EMS Executive)

Dr. David Wolff is the Provincial Chair of the Ontario Paramedic Association (OPA) Wellness Committee and a Senior Fellow with the McNally Project for Paramedicine Research. A veteran paramedic leader with nearly four decades of experience, David’s career has spanned the full continuum of the profession—from front-line practice and private entrepreneurship to paramedic education and executive leadership.

In addition to his leadership with the OPA, David is a member of the CIPSRT ARC Network and recently completed his Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) in Community Care and Counseling: Traumatology from Liberty University. As an educator and consultant, he specialises in psychological health and safety and the development of resilient educational frameworks. His work is dedicated to bridging the gap between high-level service management and the specialised psychological needs of the modern public safety workforce.

David, in addition to being a paramedic, also holds a Master of Adult Education from St. Francis Xavier University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Clinical Practice from Charles Sturt University. He remains a leading voice in advocating for academic rigour, evidence-based mental health support, and the scholarly advancement of paramedicine in Canada.

David serves as a Project Manager and Educational Consultant with Premergency Inc., a role that continues to expand his experience while providing the flexibility to pursue advanced academic study and serve first responders with La Cloche Trauma Institute.

Abstract - Review SHARING STRATEGIES ON HOW TO PROTECT AND IMPROVE PARAMEDIC WELLNESS (April, 2024 forum findings)

Paramedic wellness is often framed through a deficit model focused on trauma, stress, and psychological injury. This presentation builds on the findings of the Ontario Paramedic Association's Wellness Committee's first Community of Practice forum by integrating those results with insights from my phenomenological study of paramedics who maintain positive psychological well-being. The initial forum identified key strategies across individual, organisational, and system levels, including peer support, leadership, education, and flexible work environments.

Participants in the Community of Practice described wellness as a relational and meaning-based experience, grounded in connection, purpose, and support rather than the absence of stress. These findings are further illuminated in the study, in which paramedics described navigating an ongoing tension between connection and distance in their everyday work. Together, these perspectives suggest that the identified strategies do more than reduce stress—they support paramedics in remaining engaged while managing the demands of the role. Importantly, the work was described as inherently transformative. Rather than assuming paramedics are inevitably harmed by their experiences, participants described being changed in different ways, with outcomes shaped by how those experiences are understood over time.

This presentation reframes paramedic wellness as a process of meaning-making within ongoing tension and highlights how the strategies identified in our first Community of Practice can support that process. In doing so, it provides a foundation for translating prior recommendations into practice by focusing on how relational, organisational, and contextual conditions shape how paramedics experience and sustain well-being over time.

Jonathan Deline, PCP, A-EMCA, BHSc, MSc (cand.)

Jonathan Deline is a Primary Care Paramedic, educator, and organizational health advocate with over 15 years of progressive experience in emergency services across urban, rural, and remote northern contexts. He has held operational command roles in ground and flight paramedic services, led the development of peer support and community paramedicine programs in the Yukon, and contributed to multi-agency opioid crisis response as a public health innovator — work recognized by two Premier’s Award nominations for Public Health Innovation. 

A longstanding advocate for frontline worker health and institutional accountability, Jonathan brings a frank understanding of how organizational culture shapes — and often undermines — the psychological well-being of emergency services personnel. His current graduate study in Yoga Therapy at Maryland University of Integrative Health informs an emerging practice at the intersection of contemplative tradition and paramedic wellness. 

Jonathan works independently as an advisor and educator for organizations willing to ask uncomfortable questions about the cultures they’ve built.

Abstract - Against Everything That Got You Here: Rethinking Readiness in Paramedic Wellness

Paramedicine selects for and reinforces a specific psychological posture: high agency, external orientation, and action as competence. These are the qualities that  make paramedics effective — and the same qualities that, without counterbalance, create structural vulnerability to psychological injury. When the intervention reflex that serves patients at 3am is applied to one’s own nervous system, it becomes a liability. 

Current PTSD prevention frameworks in emergency medical services are predominantly post-exposure in design — debriefs, peer support, critical incident response; but they address what happens after the call. Emerging research on paramedic personality profiles identifies neuroticism, perfectionism, and underdeveloped internal locus of control as pre-existing vulnerability factors — suggesting that who arrives at the exposure may be as clinically significant as the exposure itself. 

This session introduces a complementary prevention framework drawn from Theravada Buddhist ethics: Ahimsa, or non-harm through skilled restraint. Reframed for a clinical context, non-action is not passivity — it is the disciplined capacity to be present and effective without the internal compulsion to fix, control, or resolve. Cultivating this orientation proactively, before exposure, offers a qualitatively different layer of protection than reactive intervention. 

Paramedicine’s routine exposure to death, grief, and human suffering at scale carries a dimension that clinical frameworks rarely name: spiritual and existential injury. Recent Canadian research on moral injury in paramedic services specifically consistently identifies spiritual erosion — loss of meaning, existential questioning, and damaged worldview — as a core consequence of the work. A contemplative framework addresses this directly, offering not a treatment for the wounded conscience but a stable orientation from which suffering can be witnessed without the self collapsing.

Drawing on 15 years of frontline  paramedicine including field supervision, community paramedicine, and operational command; graduate study in Yoga Therapy; and current literature on psychological flexibility and mindfulness-based resilience, this session offers wellness coordinators and peer support leads a framework for recognizing action-orientation as a structural vulnerability — and practical language for addressing it upstream. 

Emerging research raises the further question of whether peer supporters themselves are vulnerable to vicarious trauma through their role — suggesting that the framework proposed here is as relevant to the wellness infrastructure as to the frontline it supports. 

Participants will leave with a reframed understanding of readiness — one that begins not with the next call, but with the practitioner who answers it.

Mike Lockington, B.A., M.P.S.

Mike Lockington has been a Canadian police officer for the past 28 years.  He currently serves as a Staff Sergeant, with a background spanning investigative, administrative, and front-line roles.

He holds a Master of Public Safety from Wilfrid Laurier University. Mike is the author of Resilience on the Front Line, a narrative-driven account of frontline emergency response that examines how police, paramedics, fire, and other trauma-exposed professionals navigate repeated exposure to critical incidents and organizational pressure. His book highlights the human realities of crisis work and the ways institutional systems shape resilience, decision-making, and well-being in high-risk environments.

He is currently a PhD student at TMU in the Urban Health program, where his research explores resilience as a socially and institutionally embedded process across trauma-exposed roles, including a focus on police detectives who investigate intimate partner violence (IPV) matters within the Greater Toronto Area. 

Abstract - Resilience on the Front Line: From Crisis Management to Structural Well-Being in Paramedicine

Paramedics serve as society’s steady hands during moments of crisis, often entering people’s lives when they are most vulnerable. However, repeated exposure to trauma, loss, and operational stress carries a cumulative impact that can affect mental health, relationships, and long-term resilience. Too often, wellness supports are introduced only after a clinician is already struggling rather than being treated as essential infrastructure for sustaining a healthy workforce.

This session advocates for a shift in perspective: positioning paramedic wellness as a strategic priority that supports operational readiness, retention, and long-term career sustainability.

Drawing on nearly three decades of experience as a police officer and wellness leader working alongside trauma-exposed professionals, this presentation shares practical insights from the presenter's book Resilience on the Front Line: 101 Recommendations for Trauma-Exposed Professionals. Using the four pillars of the Community Safety and Well-Being Framework: Social Development, Prevention, Intervention, and Crisis Response, participants will explore how organizations can embed wellness into everyday practice in ways that are practical, relatable, and achievable within paramedic environments.

Strategies discussed include implementing structured wellness check-ins, strengthening psychological readiness considerations during recruitment, improving access to culturally competent clinicians who understand frontline service realities, and recognizing the essential role of families as part of the support system.

Participants will leave with tangible leadership-informed strategies to help build a culture of care that supports paramedics before, during, and after exposure to critical incidents, moving wellness from a reactive response to a structural foundation of professional practice.

Samantha Zahra, A-EMCA, BA, MACP, RP

Samantha Zahra is a Registered Psychotherapist, Primary Care Paramedic, and Founder of Frontline 9 Consulting, where she works directly with first responder and high-trauma exposed organizations to advance proactive mental health systems and strengthen organizational culture. Drawing on over a decade of paramedic experience and extensive clinical training in trauma-focused therapeutic modalities, Samantha brings a uniquely integrated perspective that bridges operational realities with evidence-based psychological care. Her work is deeply informed by both professional and lived experience; a perspective that has shaped her focus on prevention. Through this lens, she supports organizations in moving beyond reactive models of care toward systems that actively strengthen recovery as it unfolds.

As a consultant, Samantha works in partnership with paramedic, police, and fire services, as well as healthcare organizations to design and implement practical, prevention-oriented mental health strategies. Her work spans system-level consulting, including peer support program development, leadership engagement, policy and protocol design, and the integration of evidence-based approaches into existing wellness frameworks. Her consulting style is collaborative, grounded, and aligned with the realities of frontline work, ensuring recommendations are both credible and implementable.

Samantha is an experienced speaker known for delivering clear, direct, and operationally relevant presentations that resonate with first responder audiences. She translates complex psychological concepts into practical strategies, challenging organizations to rethink prevention, recovery, and long-term wellness in a way that fits their culture and demands. In addition to her consulting work, Samantha serves as Chief Clinical Officer at Nellie Health, where she streamlines clinical strategy, quality oversight, and the advancement of trauma-focused, evidence-based care. 

She holds a Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology from Yorkville University, a Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences with a minor in Psychology from Brock University, and a Paramedic diploma from Niagara College. Samantha is also a CPT Quality-Rated Provider with advanced training in multiple gold-standard trauma-focused treatments. Through her work, she remains committed to helping organizations build systems that better support those who carry the psychological demands of critical frontline service.

Abstract - Reframing the Response: Advancing PTSD Prevention in Paramedic Services

Paramedic services across Ontario have made meaningful progress in recognizing post-traumatic stress injury and strengthening supports. As this work evolves, there is opportunity to enhance wellness programs by incorporating psychologically informed, proactive approaches that support adaptive recovery before injury develops. Supported by current research and psychological models of trauma, and informed by frontline experience, this presentation reframes trauma as a transdiagnostic risk factor underlying a range of mental health outcomes, including PTSD, depression, anxiety, and substance use. By understanding trauma in this way, services can move beyond siloed approaches and develop prevention strategies that address systems-level change.

Central to this session is the conceptualization of PTSD as a disorder of non-recovery. Rather than viewing PTSD as an inevitable consequence of exposure, this highlights how disruptions in natural recovery processes, particularly in meaning-making, cognitive processing, and social context, shape long-term outcomes. This shift creates a strong foundation for prevention by emphasizing the active support of natural recovery processes as they unfold, rather than intervening only once those processes have been disrupted.

Participants will explore how operational culture, burden of responsibility, and cumulative exposure interact with cognitive processes to influence recovery trajectories. Practical, evidence-informed strategies will be introduced, including:

• Cognitive resilience training grounded in Cognitive Processing Therapy • Early, non-pathologizing approaches to processing difficult calls • Integration of prevention principles into peer support structures • Organizational strategies that actively support adaptive recovery

This session supports services in moving beyond reactive, post-incident approaches toward prevention-oriented systems that shape healthier psychological outcomes. It will address building systems that adapt to operational stressors such as high call volumes and retention challenges. Participants will leave with a clear framework and practical considerations to rethink and evolve their wellness programs toward a more prevention-focused approach across the full career span of a paramedic. 

William Lewis, CMM III, EMS Executive, CCP(F)

William (Bill) Lewis is a paramedic leader with more than 30 years of experience in emergency medical services and paramedic system leadership in Ontario. His career has included frontline operations, clinical practice, executive leadership, and professional standards oversight within municipal paramedic services.

Bill previously served as Deputy Chief – Professional Standards with Huron County Paramedic Services, where he led clinical governance, quality assurance, and professional practice programs. His work focused on strengthening clinical performance while ensuring organizational systems supported both patient safety and paramedic wellbeing. 

He holds the designation of Certified Municipal Manager III (CMM III) and the EMS Executive certification, reflecting advanced leadership training in municipal governance and emergency medical services administration. Bill is also a Critical Care Paramedic (Flight) [CCP(F)], with experience responding to complex, high-acuity emergency environments.

Over the course of his career, Bill has been involved in responses to major incidents and community-wide emergencies that place significant psychological demands on first responders and the communities they serve. His interest in psychological health and PTSD prevention is informed by both leadership experience and personal experience navigating the long-term impacts of cumulative trauma exposure in paramedicine.

Bill is the Founder and Principal Consultant of PulsePoint Advisory Inc., where he works with paramedic services and health organizations on clinical governance, program development, quality improvement, and leadership strategy. His work increasingly focuses on helping services develop system-level approaches to psychological safety and PTSD prevention within paramedicine.

Abstract - The Weight We Carry: Revisiting PTSD Prevention in Paramedicine

Paramedics routinely witness events that most people will never experience in a lifetime—often thousands of times across a career. While the profession has made important progress in recognizing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other psychological injuries, many current prevention strategies were developed before the cumulative impact of repeated traumatic exposure in paramedicine was fully understood.

Across a career, paramedics may respond to high-acuity medical emergencies, sudden deaths, critically ill children, violent incidents, and large-scale community disasters. Over time, the psychological weight of these experiences can accumulate in ways that are not always immediately visible. Current research in paramedic  psychological health increasingly highlights the role cumulative trauma exposure plays in the development of operational stress injuries and PTSD. 

This presentation invites paramedic leaders, educators, and frontline providers to revisit and critically examine current approaches to PTSD prevention within paramedicine. Drawing on current research, operational experience, and leadership perspectives, the session explores how cumulative trauma exposure affects paramedics throughout their careers and how organizational systems influence psychological outcomes. 

Participants will examine how leadership practices, workplace culture, and structured post-incident supports can strengthen psychological safety within paramedic organizations. The session will also explore how psychological health considerations can be integrated into quality assurance processes, leadership development, and operational planning. Rather than focusing solely on individual resilience strategies, this presentation highlights growing evidence that organizational structures, leadership practices, and system design play a critical role in preventing psychological injury among paramedics.

Attendees will leave with practical insights that both frontline paramedics and service leaders can use to evaluate their current PTSD prevention efforts and strengthen psychological health supports within their organizations.

PSHSA - Jackie Sam, BSc, MPH

Jackie Sam is an occupational health and safety professional with nearly 10 years of experience leading OHS programs in public sector settings. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Sciences and Research, and a Master of Public Health specializing in Occupational and Environmental Health. Jackie’s current role in program management enables her to support key projects, drive strategic initiatives, and foster collaboration. She is passionate about advocating for worker wellbeing and supporting organizations create safer and healthier environments. Jackie’s diverse background includes roles in community care, hospital settings, and return-to-work planning with the WSIB. Over the past three years, Jackie has supported PSHSA initiatives related to mental health anti-stigma and PTSI prevention in public safety.

Abstract

Public Services Health and Safety Association (PSHSA) will present key findings from its review of PTSD Prevention Plans across Ontario public safety organizations, highlighting strengths, gaps, and emerging practices that support proactive psychological injury prevention. Building on these insights, PSHSA will facilitate an interactive workshop to help paramedic services update their PTSD/PTSI Plans by walking through practical considerations and strategies across the prevention continuum.