Fire departments and local emergency management agencies will be able to track fire incidents and exposures to infectious diseases.
HARRISBURG, Pa.-Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Mark Schweiker has announced that the Office of the State Fire Commissioner (OSFC) will purchase more than 2,400 software licenses and maintenance agreements that will enable every fire department statewide to track and report fires and other emergencies and exposures to infectious diseases, including hepatitis C.
The $700,000 funding for the initiative was derived from a hepatitis C education and prevention line item in the state’s 2000-01 budget.
“We have been working for several years to develop a statewide fire-incident reporting system,” said Schweiker, who chairs the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Council. “Our fire and emergency responders need this information not only for injury-prevention, fire-prevention, and infectious-disease prevention programs, but also to improve their understanding of how to better provide these critical but costly services that are so essential to our communities’ safety.”
Schweiker explained that the system, the Pennsylvania Fire Information Reporting System (PennFIRS), will benefit the state’s hepatitis C education and awareness program in that emergency providers can use it to track potential exposures to infectious diseases. The tracking mechanism, he added, will help firefighters to identify possible exposures, making early diagnosis and treatment possible and to document job-related exposures for insurance needs.’
For the past five years, the PennFIRS Task Force has been assisting the OSFC to develop the statewide fire-information reporting system. In 1997 the Task Force conducted a survey of the state’s fire departments and found extensive support for a statewide reporting system. Fire departments from across the state assisted the Task Force in a number of pilot studies, ranging from a paper version of the new National Fire Incident Reporting (NFIRS) software to using state-of-the-art computer software based on the old NFIRS (4.1) protocols and participating in beta testing of the new NFIRS software.
“From the very beginning, the OSFC and the PennFIRS Task Force agreed that, in order to provide the kind of electronic data collection that we needed, we would have to wait for the release of the New NFIRS 5.0 software that was under development by the U.S. Fire Administration,” said State Fire Commissioner Edward Mann. “The very complicated nature of that software and the amount of volunteer time that went into its development extended development time into this year.” Mann explained that the new system, which entails incorporating the state’s Powerport and e-Government initiatives, will result in a “digital network that quickly and easily moves data and provides access to the information everyone needs to provide better, safer service.”
The State Fire Commissioner’s office will meet with county and regional organizations and agencies to discuss collecting data, facilitating the flow of information, networking, training, needs, and opportunities.
For additional information, contact Marko Bourne, Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, at (717) 651-2139.
