The spirit of the American emergency services volunteer seems to be alive and well, even though our numbers are dwindling quickly. Recruitment and retention are still the biggest challenges, with very few people having more (than less) time to volunteer. Volunteering requires a whole lot more of our time than it used to, and our collective pool of volunteers doesn’t seem to be getting any younger.
Ever-growing demands of time surrounding training, maintaining certifications, continuing education credits, and often having to travel for hours simply to find a certification testing site, simply works against volunteer agencies being able to grow and retain their numbers of volunteers.
In my very rural part of the country, we not only have our volunteer fire departments (of those, a number of which do not do any type of rescue or EMS work), we have two volunteer ambulance services, and a volunteer search and rescue service that handles all rescue and extrication calls. Imagine, if you will, the struggle for grant dollars to keep each of these three wonderful services afloat. If search and rescue is working a grant for a new rescue truck at the same time that one or more of the volunteer fire departments are working toward a new or newer apparatus, they’re often competing against each other for the same grant money.
A few weeks ago, our local county Emergency Services Director asked me if I’d help them toward obtaining an EMS grant, that was specifically funding new extrication tools. The grant is being administered by our state Health and Human Services. The requirements for the grant seemed straightforward enough to me, but as it would play out, nothing could have been further from the truth.
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The Emergency Services Director for our county asked me for my teaching credentials/IFSAC or Pro Board certs and my Curriculum Vitae (as I volunteer to teach fire/rescue/EMS classes for our organizations). After providing all that was asked of me, the gentlemen from State Health and Human Services said that I needed to provide them with a specific certificate that shows “I’m qualified to teach an operations level extrication program.”
To say I was flabbergasted with their reply would be putting it mildly. My Level 2 IFSAC/Pro Board instructor certs, 20-plus years as an instructor, and my 35-plus years in the career and volunteer fire and EMS service didn’t suffice? I called all over the country to other agencies and a host of fellow instructors asking if anyone had ever heard of such a thing. Nobody had. That was when I had to go back, re-read the email, and look to see who and what agency was administering this grant. Did I mention that it was being administered by Health and Human Services?
Our county representative could not possibly have worked any harder to help get our search and rescue service the money for new, heavy-duty extrication tools. As angry and frustrated as I got over this insanity, I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize their chances for the grant. That said, I literally had to call and embarrass these state admin people (not firefighters, officers, or EMS folks) by burying them in NFPA standards and the meaning of IFSAC/Pro Board certification. This grant application came down to the last day for submission. I’m sure that our Emergency Services Director had a lot more to do than to spend days on the telephone and email trying to wade through a sea of ridiculousness.
Is this why rural volunteer departments and agencies can’t have nice things?
We are summarily discounted for grant dollars due to lack of call volume. Lack of call volume doesn’t change the age and compatibility of apparatus and equipment, does it? We are summarily dismissed and discounted for grant dollars if we can’t guarantee a fixed number of responders for each and every call for help. Should that requirement keep the souls that do volunteer to respond day in and day out to emergency calls in rural America from having the tools and equipment to do their “volunteering” safely and effectively?
Let’s face it, not all volunteer fire departments or first responder agencies are created equally. That said, rural volunteer agencies often must fight twice as hard for half of the opportunities, and half of the available dollars, simply because of the nature of the fact that we’re “rural.” Please don’t misunderstand my rant, as I appreciate there being criteria needed for grant dollars. I do struggle to understand bureaucratic grant administrators that don’t understand their own criteria and what it might take a particular department to try to meet those criteria. To them it may be nothing more than checking boxes on a list. On the rural street side of that equation, we know it is a whole lot more to us than that. We also know that, statistically, we can’t compete with bigger departments that run more calls and have more personnel.
Whether we run on 12, 1,200, or 12,000 emergency calls a year, none of our apparatus, vehicles, or equipment gets any younger with time. We all know that vehicles, rescue equipment, and other tools of our trade often break down and deteriorate faster from lack of use than from regular or overuse, so regardless of whether we can meet the call volume requirements for grant dollars or not, nothing stops our vehicles and equipment from aging and deteriorating.
Perhaps it’s time for those “in charge” of grants to take a closer look at these grant requirements, and who’s applying for them. Even more importantly, perhaps it’s time for someone to take a closer look “at those who are taking a closer look.”
We don’t check boxes when we’re in the field cutting a family out of a wrecked car in the middle of the night, or while we’re doing CPR on a patient while we wait for an ambulance. As a result, none of the things I present in this piece should be the reasons “why we can’t have nice things” in rural response areas.
