Editorial

RescueDigest presents fully original editorial articles on topics of leadership, education and career development in emergency services.

What Message Does Your Service Send?

GOAL: To ensure that members of your organization understand that everything they do affects your organization’s Public Image. Public Image is Public Sentiment, Public Sentiment is Public Support, and Public Support affects your ability to operate, regardless of your organization’s status as a public or private entity. Everything You Do In Uniform or With Your Vehicle Says… (What’s Message?) You ...

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Embracing Who We Are As Firefighters

Firefighters Problem:  Embracing the age old joke, embracing who we are as firefighters, and maybe embracing the damn cat, too.   Back in November I remember slugging into a couch to watch the Thanksgiving Day Parade with my son. My favorite three year old was fascinated and loved watching the balloons and floats come down the road.  (Mostly because he ...

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Fire Code for First Responders

Fire Code for 1st Responders   The fire of today is not your grandmother’s fire. Furnishings today contain so much foam and other plastics that the BTU release is much greater than a fire 30-50 years ago. In addition, what hazards do newer construction products and methods present for all first responders arriving at a burning or damaged building?

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SCHOOL LOCKDOWN DRILL CONSIDERATIONS

  SCHOOL LOCKDOWN DRILL CONSIDERATIONS* Problem: First Responders aren’t always privy to school’s lockdown policies *Editor’s Note: This article was readied for publication immediately prior to the recent school shooting incident in Ohio. The article was not written in response to or  meant in any way to critique the incident or the men and women who responded to the call. ...

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Get Fit to Save Lives

  Emergency Services Fitness: Get Fit to Save Lives   Goal:  To ensure your safety and ability to perform your job in emergency services: a physically taxing profession.   Although we’re in the profession of protecting and helping the public, we too often neglect ourselves and our bodies. In order to provide the services we’re sworn to provide to the ...

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The Easiest Way to be a Life Saver

The Easiest Way to be a Life Saver Goal: To recognize the opportunities that arise in emergency services to provide true care for others, especially when it seems like a waste of your training and expertise to do so. “You often help your patients the most when you think you’re doing the least.”  This advice was given to me as ...

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Critical Communications

  Communications is a critical factor in every aspect of emergency services. GOAL: Improve radio communications during emergency scene operations.  No one could say that good communications is important for firefighting, but not law enforcement, EMS or disaster response. Likewise, as complex as emergency commutation networks get (analog / digital / repeaters / encrypted / trunked systems / tin-cans w/strings) there ...

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Does Lecture Based Learning Work?

Death By Power Point Does Lecture Based Learning Work? GOAL: To improve emergency services education. Physics professors are challenging the idea of using lecture as the primary tool for teaching. Physicist David Hestenes’ study found that using the lecture format, students could memorize specific formulas, but weren’t fully grasping the overall concepts. For example, an EMT student may be able ...

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