After some 30 years as a fire officer in the UK and Europe, I was delighted to have the opportunity to run operations at the Fire Service college, then to be part of the team forming the new Defence Fire and Rescue service. For the last seven years, I’ve been fortunate enough to work around the world on a variety of emergency medical, fire, police and security projects.
These experiences have led me to understand that categorisation of responders varies enormously from country to country: some paramedics are considered to be firefighters, many firefighters consider themselves to be defence workers or police and even more police officers consider themselves to be rescuers. To be clear then, there is no agreed definition of a firefighter and when viewed globally, this simple word can mean all things to all people.
The phrase first responder, however, does seem to have resonance to all nations. Whether you’re deploying a defibrillator following cardiac arrest, extinguishing a fire, responding to civil unrest or extricating someone from a complex road accident, the term first responder will apply to you, and everybody recognises the importance of the role in resolving emergency situations. Despite the many differences in response models and phraseology, every state and nation relies heavily on its first responders to ensure resilience in times of trouble. Indeed, resilience and often, even survival.
It seems somewhat perverse then that greater care isn’t taken of this vital resource. During the recent pandemic, we witnessed a lack of preparedness across the board for our first responders: medics often without PPE, firefighters without vaccinations and police and security staff without effective procedures. Protection and decontamination were ad-hoc and often made up on the spot. We’ve seen evidence of this in every country we’ve worked in, frequently blaming supply problems but always describing a lack of planning for the foreseeable and inevitable. We would all hope that lessons have been learnt and that preparing to protect our first responders might have progressed considerably since then. However, from what I’ve seen on the ground, I’m far from sure that this is the case.
In his piece in this edition, Joshua C. Huminski, highlights this and the need to go much further than simply planning to protect existing response teams (vital as this is) but also into the trickier aspects of creation of supplementary and voluntary contingencies to reinforce standing arrangements whenever needed. This kind of thinking can be highly problematic considering the ways of working of many agencies, the cultural issues around volunteering and the political dynamic of admitting that what we have may simply not be enough to cope with the next onslaught of endemic or pandemic and that local or global mutual aid arrangements have their own limitations.
We are grateful to Joshua for championing better preparedness for our responders, and hope that readers in their local or national authorities will use the principles Joshua describes to encourage their managers to prepare better for the inevitable next pandemic or medical challenge – not from the perspective of their own job title but from the perspective that we are all first responders and when our communities need us, this is what they will demand.
About the Author
Jon Hall is Managing Director of the Resilience Advisors Network. A former Chief Fire Officer and the UK lead for National Resilience, Jon brings a uniquely informed perspective to the role of fire and rescue services on an international stage.
