Tag Archives: fire department management

In many cases the most important component of their treatment will involve time. The time to get a diagnosis, get the proper treatment, and recover from that treatment. A caring and empathetic manager and organization can make a world of difference, especially when an illness puts an individual’s life and career in jeopardy.

I certainly support the idea of pursuing accreditation by those organizations that have the resources, e.g., people, time, and money, but what about those who don't? Well, for those departments I'd like to suggest that they use my "homegrown" template for identifying what's important in their service delivery so that they can then collect the data to determine, How are we doing?

If I were you, I’d spend my limited money on equipment to put CAFS into my firefighting arsenal instead of buying LDH; the 6” water mains in your town really don’t justify the use of LDH. I think that maintaining your 3” supply line cache and combining it with CAFS will give your department plenty of tactical firefighting capability.

This story is written from my perspective; it is simply my own experience. My breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent legal action combined for my “early exit”, so the “sudden end” was really not so sudden. I fully expected to retire just as many firefighters did before me had: 50-years-old, twenty years of service, healthy, and financially stable.

In the past couple of years, many communities have been faced with torrential rains and flooding. As we've seen in the most recent flooding in Colorado, we are exposed to a huge risk when it comes to emergency response to both the slow rising water type of flooding and flash floods.

One thing that I do believe is that cases like this are to Fire and EMS leadership and management what the "a canary dying in a coal mine" meant to coal miners underground.

By:  Robert Avsec I opened my e-mail yesterday to view the latest FireRescue1.com newsletter and this is one of the leads: Pregnant firefighter placed on unpaid leave by Conn. department City officials are investigating saying the department may be violating state and federal laws by placing her on unrequested, unpaid leave because she’s pregnant. The next thing I did was ...

It seems to me that many fire and EMS organizations are a bit "Johnny-come-lately" when it comes to the health and well-being of their people, and some still have not come to the party. I was very fortunate to have spent my career with one of the organizations that‘s frequently been on the forefront of efforts to constantly make improvements for the safety, health and welfare of its people.

I once heard this at a leadership and management seminar I attended and it’s stuck with me all these years: Middle management is like the white frosting in an Oreo cookie. It’s the “glue” that holds everything together and it’s the “buffer” that keeps the two hard cookie layers apart.

By conducting an ICOF analysis, a department’s leader would provide an objective process that can help break down those informational “silos” so that all managers...