A two-year effort by the Center for Public Safety Excellence (CPSE) and the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) results in a white paper looking at the changing role of local government and its impact on the 21st Century Fire and Emergency Services. The process looked out to 2050 and identifies 8 critical issues that require attention.
RE-IDENTIFICATION
The action items include:
- Activities to support risk reduction as well as medical and injury prevention efforts.
- Messaging strategies for clarifying and supporting the role of first responders in addressing risk reduction, medical and injury prevention and social services support.
- Strategies to reduce the number of 911 calls.
“Overcome By Events” is a military term used when a situation changes so rapidly that previously proposed courses of action are no longer relevant. It also shows up in long-term federal projects when the situation has changed the environment or requirements of a contracted service.
The coronavirus experience will accelerate the need to address Re-Identification as fire and emergency services continue to respond to the impact of the pandemic while in an economic collapse with a reduction of state and local funding along with mis-matched Medicare EMS reimbursement.
CULTURE
The action items include:
- Create a process that allows for goal setting, strategic planning, and periodic feedback by all stakeholders of the community and the members
of the organization. - Adopt a philosophy that promotes seeking out the best industry practices of other professional organizations and establish a process by which organization can evaluate those practices and implement those that are relevant in their own organization to improve performance.
- Establish a process to continually assess the skills, knowledge, and abilities needed by the organizational workforce to meet the changing community demands for service, to meet the external challenges placing pressures on the organization, and to help address the changes and innovation that are occurring or will need to occur in the agency.
The experience of an international health crisis compounded by social justice issues – where emergency service workers have pinged-ponged from hero to enemy – presents an opportunity to evolve our culture that meets both the community and the emergency responder’s needs and expectations.
ROBUST USE OF DATA
The action items include:
- Champion a substantial update to NFIRS to become a more relevant and technologically robust system or replace it with another system capable of integrating with new innovative data systems to provide advance analytics, and support evidence-based decision making, built upon the receipt of quality data for local agencies.
- Employ advanced analytics to assist in making predictive and prescriptive decisions that are focused on the outcomes the agency is trying to achieve.
- Champion legislative changes to allow for sharing of patient data between hospitals and responding agencies and encourage interagency cooperation to promote the evaluation of patient outcomes based upon the entirety of the response to that patient.
An existing weakness in many emergency services agencies is the ability to use data to make smart decisions, define what is “good,” and explain it to our bosses and the public. Data analytics provides powerful decision-making tools.
HEALTH AND WELLNESS
The action items include:
- Conduct research on the impacts of current work cycles on the health of the workforce and the impacts of sleep deprivation and sleep hygiene on the longterm health of the individual and their cognitive abilities while on duty.
- Develop on-going mental health assessments for emergency responders to promote early recognition of developing mental health issues aligned with a mental health assistance process if issues are detected.
- Adopt physical performance and annual fitness testing requirements for fire and emergency services employees to ensure the responder can safely do the job without injury or risk to their health.
- Conduct continued research to develop a comprehensive approach to reducing exposures, the best method(s) for decontamination, and periodic testing to help ensure a safer environment for the workforce.
Occupational cancer and suicide are joining sudden cardiac arrest as the leading causes of death for emergency responders. The IAFC If You Don’t Feel Well, Don’t Make It Your Farewell initiative is one way to address this critical issue.
PARTNERSHIPS
The action items include:
- Inventory and leverage the allied services (law enforcement, health, social services, nongovernmental organizations) in the community to provide more effective and efficient services.
- Promote individual and neighborhood self-sufficiency though existing programs (e.g. community emergency response teams, the radio amateur civil emergency service, volunteers in patrol, and senior Medicare patrol volunteers) to create greater resiliency in the community.
Emergency services are the community’s focal point for neighborhood resiliency.
SUSTAINABILITY
The action items include:
- Develop a better understanding of community needs and their changing demands for services so as to modify the service delivery model(s) to meet them.
- Promote collaboration between labor groups, local government, and state government to ensure existing pension financial commitments are met ensuring adequate service levels within the communities being served.
- Adopt the concepts outlined in “Vision 20/20 – National Strategies for Fire Loss Prevention,” and incorporate these recommendations into the daily agency operation to minimize the impacts to the community and emergency responders.
States just have 71% of the assets needed to fund promised retirement benefits, as documented in the latest Pew Charitable Trust analysis.
Because growing pension debt leads to higher costs, states with poorly funded plans have had to increase their pension contributions. And the higher cost of paying for benefits may affect the states’ ability to fund other core government services and crowd out other important public investments.
Many fire departments are dealing with a crisis of underfunded pension liabilities. An October 1, 2018 commentary by Daniel DiSalvo from the Manhattan Institute described the issue:
In 2015, the Federal Reserve estimated that states’ and localities’ pension funds had accumulated $5.52 trillion in liabilities but had set aside only $3.7 trillion in assets. To ensure that public employees receive the benefits promised by their plans, state and local governments are spending more every year on their pension systems. According to census data, those governments contributed $40.1 billion to their pension systems in 2000; by 2016, that number had skyrocketed to $140.5 billion. In addition, pension funds are making riskier investments in an effort to catch up.
That means more of the annual budget is committed to meeting the pension liability. In some fire departments, this represents up to 17% of a fire department annual budget in states that are mandating full funding of pensions by 2033 (or 2040 or 2050). Today’s pensions (and budgets) are suffering from earlier administrations that “skipped” a payment or raided the pension fund to meet a budget shortfall.
TECHNOLOGY
The action items include:
- Anticipate that artificial intelligence, smart technology, and robotics will shape future service delivery dramatically in the next 30 years and will change response methods requiring a new skill set and strategic processes for fire and emergency services agencies.
- Champion the United States Fire Administration, in concert with other national organizations, to develop a fire advanced research challenge to promote application of technology developments for use in the emergency services through proof of concept and competitive challenges, similar to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) challenge utilized by the Department of Defense.
INCLUSIVENESS
The action items include:
- Create pathways to attract, prepare, and hire underrepresented personnel into the fire and emergency services.
- Promote cultural understanding and humility within the workforce to increase the quality of interactions and the services provided to the community.
The late Honorable John Lewis, U.S. Representative from Georgia, addresses the 2010 IAFF Human Relations Conference (about 20 minutes)
Next Steps
If you have been working in local government during the last decade, you have experienced some of the most dramatic shifts in how it operates. Whether it’s the political dynamic, the elevated threshold for transparency, the lack of civility, or the demands placed on local government to provide more services, it has been a time of real change.
As we look to the future, those dynamics may continue, but other forces of change will emerge, making the leading and managing of tomorrow’s governmental system very exciting, very challenging, and very fast.
This white paper provides an excellent foundation to build the 2050 version of the Fire and Emergency Services leader. We face amazing opportunities and difficult challenges. We also have the talent and ability to build OUR future.
Please download the white paper and plan your path. https://cpse.org/projects/21st-century/
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Center for Public Safety Excellence website to view and download white paper: https://cpse.org/projects/21st-century/
IAFC Cardiac Arrest Toolkit. https://www.iafc.org/topics-and-tools/safety-health/cardiac-awareness-toolkit
Vision 20/20 – National Strategies for Fire Loss Prevention. https://strategicfire.org/crr
(2020 June) The State Pension Funding Gap: 2018. Overall debt at historic high after recovery, underscoring need to prepare for a downturn. The Pew Charitable Trusts. https://www.pewtrusts.org/-/media/assets/2020/06/statepensionfundinggap2018.pdf
DiSalvo, D. (2018 October 1) How Public Pension Boards Are Making a Crisis Worse. Because of the way they’re structured, they have incentives to ignore the retirement plans’ going term health. Governing.com
Petrella, D. (2014 June 2014) Rising police, fire pension costs squeezing city budgets. The State Journal-Register. https://www.sj-r.com/article/20140628/News/140619232
Feature Image: Screen shot from this animation of a gyroscopic firefighting vehicle.