Management Sciences

Developing and communicating a department's mission, vision, and values are important organizational management tools for any fire and EMS department, especially one that's committed to getting the best performance from its members and delivering the best service to its external stakeholders.

If you’ve come upon this book expecting to read about emergency calls, I responded to during my 26-year career with the Chesterfield (Va.) Fire and EMS Department, I'm afraid you might be a tad disappointed. But if you want to learn about the greatest single assignment that I had the pleasure and satisfaction of serving in during my career, you have the right book. Because in this book you'll learn about how a single project that I was a part of that created not one, but two transformational changes in our fire and EMS department.

We can provide a sound organizational structure with policies and procedures that are congruent with an organization’s vision, mission, and values. And we can attempt to modify undesirable individual behavior, when necessary, using progressive discipline. But I don’t think that we can make anyone do something that they don’t want to do.

By: Robert Avsec, Executive Fire Officer It was a hot and humid August evening in 1979, and I was a new EMT working my first job in public safety. My employer was a private sector ambulance service that had the contract to provide EMS to the city of Richmond, Virginia. On this night, my partner—a “street savvy” dude if there ...

But over the course of my career (both of them) I've embraced this definition of integrity “Keeping your promises.” As in when you get married you promise many things (love, honor, cherish, etc.) and above all to be faithful to your spouse.

How many of our leaders are taking the information from NIOSH Firefighter Fatality Reports and using that information to take a good, hard and objective look at their organization and asking the tough question, "What are we doing to prevent this from happening here?

As a PSAP [Public Safety Answering Point] manager one of the BIGGEST responsibilities is hiring and on-boarding new employees. Let's face it, this profession is one where the doors are constantly swinging open with turnover. It's easy to blame the management team, but the issues with retention in PSAPs are much more rooted than what's on the surface of workplace relationships. 

They initially used focus groups of firefighters and officers to collect data but after a couple of groups the research team had already learned something about firefighters...

Firefighters and officers behaving badly. There are probably hundreds of causative factors at work, and while I'm not a trained sociologist by trade, I'm going to discuss a couple that really stand out in my mind: the use of social media and "helicopter parenting".

These three steps are more than just individual or group tasks. Collectively, they constitute leadership and mentoring on your part. By doing so, you’re creating expectations for attendance at future conferences by you and members of your department.