Volunteer Pool
Until a few months ago, about the time I started going to fire board meeting's and asking about volunteers, Meadview had six volunteer firefighters, but they were recently changed to support personnel because of insurance costs I'm told.
At the fire board meeting the chief said he wasn't opposed to volunteers, but at the same time, he took our few remaining volunteer firefighters and changed them to support personnel.
It's our fire district and anyone who wants to volunteer should be asked their skills. Lots of people have computer skills, yet we were paying for an IT guy.
I'm sure they're a lot of smart people around with a lot of valuable skills, but you have to be open to suggestions.
It's our fire district and we need to get involved and pay attention to how it's ran.
VOLUNTEERS and WOMEN
We keep hearing how hard it is to get volunteers in Dolan Springs and Meadview. So again we need to think out of the box if we want to cover 2000 square miles.
The vast majority of calls to the LMRFD, 70% are medical calls. We need volunteer EMT's on the ambulance, and our paid firefighters on a paramedic squad as support.
Okay it's hard to find firefighters here, but we don't need firefighters, we need EMT's. When we require the EMT's on the ambulance to be firefighters, we pretty much limit our volunteer pool to men.
Lets face it, not many women want to be firefighters. The vast majority of firefighters are men, with less than 4% in the United States being women.
Medicine on the other hand is made up primarily of women, nurses, physicians, OR techs. According to the Journal of Emergency Medical Services women make up about 50% of today's EMS services.
So by requiring the ambulance EMT's to be firefighters we severely limit our volunteer pool. We may have a wealth of experienced women with a medical backgrounds out there who have no interest in being a firefighter. We'll never know unless we ask.
We have one female volunteer EMT in Meadview who is not a firefighter. The 80 year old +- firefighter volunteers were made "support" personnel as they were not insurable. As Chief Moore explained, our PAID personnel need to be both fire and EMS for the obvious reason that we can only afford 3 personnel and they need to be able to fulfill both functions. What we need are some volunteers to head up some volunteer programs. Meadview has Bobby Porzio who takes care of their FF/EMS group. They have someone who turns aluminum cans in for cash to donate to the Meadview "support" group for incidentals. They have people who volunteer to write articles and post information around town and in their newsletters. So far nobody has stepped up to the plate in Dolan and started recruiting volunteers of any type.
ReplyDeleteFirst I've heard of a volunteer EMT in Meadview. In all the talk about volunteers, no one mentioned her.
DeleteAs far as volunteers coming forward, I'll ask at the next fire board meeting how many others have called and had no one call back. Last meeting there were several who have called.
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DeleteCan I get the costs for insurance and Workman's Comp for the one volunteer EMT?
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