Part 2: Adapting to the changes facing the volunteer fire and EMS service
By Joe Maruca
In Part 1 of this article, I talked about the reasons behind fire department mission expansion and how this has impacted leadership. This article addresses aligning the fire department with a new mission that members can embrace. This requires leaders to take a deep look at the culture, traditions, and deployment model of their department and adapt for today’s needs.
The Right Mission, the Right Culture to Support the Mission
As discussed previously, gone are the days when a firefighter’s primary responsibility was to fight fires. Now it is much more common to respond to an EMS call, or a public assistance call, or any number of other types of calls that fire departments receive. On top of that, there are countless hours of training needed so firefighters can keep up with all the expanded response types they will encounter. Now add in the array of other needs a department has, such as fundraising, recruiting new members, and educating the community on fire prevention, to name a few.
To address the ever-increasing non-firefighting demands placed on today’s fire and EMS departments, chiefs and community leaders should work with their membership to reassess their department’s culture, image, and traditions with an eye towards recruiting and retaining new members who aren’t necessarily attracted strictly to firefighting. They need to think about using EMS personnel who are not firefighters. They should consider using support staff who aren’t trained for interior firefighting to perform certain roles such as storm operations, technical rescue, hazmat, and cold-zone fireground operations such as staging, accountability, traffic control/safety, and communications.
And, yes, it is just as important to consider how the department might let those who are only interested in firefighting focus strictly on that role so they aren’t driven away because they’re being pushed into roles that they aren’t interested in and don’t want to pursue. Staffing a small volunteer or mostly volunteer fire or EMS department requires more flexibility than ever before. With so much mission expansion over the past few decades, it no longer makes sense in terms of retaining volunteers to insist on having all members trained in and responsible for all things.
Chiefs and their departments should also determine, as quickly as possible, what missions they will take on and which they won’t. For instance, a small town with limited resources that hasn’t had a technical rescue call in 15 or 20 years can reasonably say that this isn’t part of their mission, and that they will instead rely upon a regional technical rescue team or an automatic aid agreement with another community for these responses. Yes, they will respond to this kind of call if it occurs (and so they do need a basic plan to assess, call for resources, isolate, and stabilize an incident). But it should be clear to the community that they will not be spending resources preparing for such an event, and that they have engaged the cooperation of a regional team or set up an automatic aid agreement for this purpose. When a department does this, it should make a clear statement of policy to its members, its elected officials, and its community regarding what level of service it can provide and how such an incident would be handled.
Excellent guidance and templates for planning and reporting are available to fire chiefs in the form of National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) standards. NFPA 1720, Standard for the Organization and Deployment of Fire Suppression Operations, Emergency Medical Operations, and Special Operations to the Public by Volunteer Fire Departments, provides recommendations for quarterly and annual reports. NFPA 1300, Standard on Community Risk Assessment and Community Risk Reduction Plan Development, provides guidance for determining what risks to prepare for.
Tackling the Response Issue
As call volume increases and the traditional deployment model (drop what you are doing and rush to the fire station) fails to turn out enough firefighters and EMS responders frequently enough and fast enough, other deployment models must be devised and tested. Some models that have proven to be successful include having on-call duty schedules or volunteer shifts with members staffing the fire or EMS station for predetermined hours. Other departments hire part-time or full-time staff to help cover calls during the day or other times when volunteers are less available.
A community might improve its EMS response by scheduling one EMS responder to respond directly from home or work to medical calls and equip that person with a radio and BLS kit so they can quickly get to a patient to provide an assessment and basic first aid, while another scheduled duty-squad gets the ambulance and arrives a few minutes later.
Another community might find success with a part-time or full-time firefighter on-duty to drive the fire engine or ambulance to a call where they are met on-scene by volunteers.
Systems like these all come with pros and cons, but departments need to experiment and find the solution that fits their call volume and type, their available staffing and skills, and their financial resources, as well as meeting community expectations. These systems also challenge traditional volunteer firefighter culture, which tends not to like being scheduled or told what to do. Strong, visionary leadership is needed to make these systems work and to provide this leadership; chiefs must be freed from much of the day-to-day crisis management of paperwork.
The increase in calls, the expanding, shifting mission, and the ever-increasing complexity facing small-town fire and EMS departments leave us with a critical lesson that change is unstoppable. Everything we do will continue to get more complex no matter how much we complain or how hard we cling to the way things are. Fire chiefs, community leaders, and firefighters must come to accept this and start planning to reinvent themselves and their departments as often as it takes to meet the needs of their communities.
Joe Maruca is chief of the West Barnstable (MA) Fire Department, a combination fire department on Cape Cod. He served as a volunteer firefighter from 1977 until becoming chief in 2005. He is a director of the National Volunteer Fire Council (NVFC) and represents the NVFC on the NFPA 1917 Technical Committee. Joe is a retired attorney and Of Counsel to the Crowell Law Office in Yarmouthport, concentrating in the area of estate planning.
