St Louis Fire Department Lifesaving Foundation

To support the St. Louis Fire Department by providing funding and equipment within the Foundation's two-fold mission: 1) to promote saving lives of those who live, work, and visit the city of St. Louis; and 2) to protect the lives of professional lifesavers. Our ongoing work will continue to support programs that improve the lives of St. Louis' first responders by providing the training and equipment they need. Our support continues to enable them to be there for the more than one million people who live and work in, and visit the city of St. Louis every day.training at the sim center includes mass casualty incident scenarios, mass casualty triage, cardioversion/defibrillation, and individualized simulation used for remediation. During the reporting period, the Foundation provided software training updates for the stlfd ems simulation center.

Cancer prevention among firefighters - all firefighters put their own lives at risk to save others in their communities. In addition to the danger of putting out fires, firefighters are at an increased risk for different types of cancer due to the smoke and hazardous chemicals they are exposed to in the line of duty. There have been multiple studies that show this increased risk for cancer. More firefighters are dying from cancer before the age of 50 than ever before. These deaths, overwhelmingly caused by their on the job exposure to carcinogens, are line of duty deaths, referred to as "dying with their boots off. "the cancer prevention program helps to purchase gear, including a second set of firefighting turn-out gear, for each member of the Department. Moreover, funds are being raised to purchase chemical extractors that will remove toxins from materials, including turn-out gear.

Public access defibrillation (pad program) - to make aeds available in public and/or private places where large numbers of people gather. The pad program has helped make St. Louis 'heart safe' by adding additional medical devices such as 12-lead ecgs with telemetry capability to the St. Louis Fire Department ambulance fleet. This additional link in the chain of survival helps provide fast, accurate pre-hospital ecg transmissions, thereby reducing time between ems arrival and patient's balloon procedure. Over the past year, the pad program has continued to respond to requests for individual defibrillators and associated training.