Interprofessional continuing education for prehospital behavioral emergency response: a city-wide pre-post study in Taiwan

Behavioral emergencies in the prehospital setting often require coordinated responses from police, fire-based emergency medical services, public health, nursing, and mental health personnel. Evidence on shared continuing education for this mixed frontline workforce is limited, particularly in Asian emergency-response systems. We conducted a city-wide single-group pre-post evaluation of a 4-hour interprofessional course delivered across nine sessions in New Taipei City, Taiwan, between 7 April and 20 June 2026. Four immediate self-reported outcome domains were assessed before and after training: self-efficacy, cognition toward behavioral emergencies, behavioral-emergency stigma, and substance-use stigma. Because no direct identifier was collected, the primary analysis was restricted to observed pre/post records with a strict demographic linkage key that occurred exactly once in both datasets; no imputation or timestamp-order matching was used. Among 750 attendees, 714 completed the pre-training questionnaire and 635 contributed complete post-training questionnaires. The primary paired analysis included 395 strictly unique observed matches. Self-efficacy increased from 3.16 ± 0.55 to 3.54 ± 0.58 (mean difference 0.39, 95% CI 0.34 to 0.44; p < 0.001; Cohen’s dz = 0.76), and cognition increased from 3.81 ± 0.59 to 3.95 ± 0.55 (mean difference 0.14, 95% CI 0.09 to 0.19; p < 0.001; Cohen’s dz = 0.29). Behavioral-emergency stigma increased slightly (mean difference 0.03, 95% CI 0.01 to 0.05), whereas substance-use stigma did not change significantly ( p = 0.716). Among 635 observed post-training respondents, 84.1%–86.3% reported agreement or strong agreement across satisfaction items. Immediate self-reported self-efficacy and cognition scores were higher after the course, while stigma scores did not improve. Because this was an uncontrolled single-group study using study-specific measures and anonymous demographic linkage, the findings should be interpreted as immediate pre-post associations rather than causal evidence of training effectiveness. Future evaluations should use unique anonymous identifiers, validated measures, delayed follow-up, and observed performance or service-level outcomes. ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT07697326 ISRCTN Registry, ISRCTN16037777. ISRCTN registered on 9 July 2026. Retrospectively registered.