First Responder Center for Excellence for Reducing Occupational Illness Injur

Fire service programs - the frce is a research to practice enterprise that builds health and wellness products and programs that can be widely disseminated throughout the First Responder community. Some of our 2023 programs included: a women's health online educational training module for firefighters and fire departments for understanding the unique impact the job has on women firefighters. Topics include Occupational exposures, reproductive health, injuries, cardiovascular disease and cancer. These online modules were created to promote awareness, enhance dissemination, and encourage incorporation into primary care and Occupational health for women in the firefighting profession. Curbside manner 2.0 entailed refinement, production, and the creation of an e-learning delivery of updated curbside manner course for field providers, with components for both fire and ems. Curbside manner was created alongside stress First aid to prepare firefighters to apply the core elements of sfa in daily care of patients and citizens in order to improve service, connection, and quality of care while helping ensure that those well practiced approaches would become our default response to one another as well.

Foundation support - the frce delivered 2-day women's health & fitness workshops at three representative fire departments around the nation. Female firefighters came together to learn valuable tools for self-care, mental health, nutrition and fitness. These informative workshops were created with input from key constituency groups, established researchers, and practitioners aware of current and evolving best practices creating the foundation for broad scale dissemination and delivery throughout the industry.

Health programs - the frce held a health & wellness symposium january 19 & 20, 2023 in st. pete's beach, fl. Participants learned about building resilience, behavioral health wellness, injury prevention, peer support programs, physical fitness, proper nutrition, sleep deprivation, stress, mindfulness, suicide prevention, and more. Over 40 topics were delivered by speakers who are leaders and pioneers in fire service health and wellness. Over 400 participants of the health & wellness symposium gained access to resources, professionals and leaders to take back to their organizations/departments to implement. This included: priorities to develop a total worker health and safety program for firefighters and fire service agencies, how health and wellness can be integrated into departments effectively and what approaches those tasked with building the program can take, how to obtain program buy-in, program outreach and evaluate your impact to stakeholders as well as practical strategies and resources to build or enhance and existing peer support program.

Program development, public safety outreach, and other programs - stress First aid is a basic but comprehensive approach to embedded peer support specifically derived from the us navy/marine corps combat and operations stress cooperation with the national Center for post-traumatic stress disorder (an arm of the veterans administration). This project expands upon initial success by developing and implementing a more accessible and cost-effective web-based delivery platform as well as update content, and to specifically include modules to assist in identifying and addressing suicidal ideation based on an adaptation of the us army's ace model. The project will also include specific elements to support dissemination and assistance with adoption and implementation at the local level.