Incredible growth, high service demand, citizen expectations, and reduced revenue mean local governments are continually changing the way we do business. Proven best practice solutions for the priority challenges facing us are available to ensure success in this challenging era. Dr. Saviak will share strategies and tools to enhance performance and optimize outcomes for your organizations and citizens.

Succession Planning and building a strong department takes an investment that is not easy but it is necessary. This session will explore the following questions:

• Why would an inexperienced FF want to be a leader?
• What does it take to build interest in leadership?
• How should a department promote Officer Development?
• What are the pitfalls of promoting the right or wrong leader?
• What are the keys to taking an inexperienced employee to a place of Leadership?
• What does an effective Officer Development Program look like?

The American fire services has seen numerous challenges in the past year including a global pandemic, civil unrest, a need to enhance diversity and inclusion in the workforce, preparing for and weathering economic impact of these events, seeking to understand the near and long term health consequences for the workforce, and the need to capture and use factual data for decision making and long term strategy. This presentation will provide insights on these issues and present current strategies and best practices for leaders to use to sustain and/or transform their organization and be well positioned to not only survive these times but to thrive!

The purpose of this presentation is not to reinvent, but to reinforce the importance for timely and quality mental health care for fire service personnel. The first portion will be devoted to the history of the Illinois State Police health care procedures and current methodology. The second portion will discuss Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, evidence based therapies, stress relievers, and relaxation exercises.

Overview: This high-energy session will take chiefs on a journey, beginning with the identification of some fire service landmines that significantly impact our members' careers, mental wellness, and overall performance of our departments. After uncovering these landmines, we will explore solutions to help overcome these areas we weren't trained on in the academy nor expected to become part of our area of responsibility.

Objectives:

1. Help attendees understand, respect and plan around some disturbing trends that impact our ability to move our departments forward today. (Predictable is Preventable).
2. Strategic Risk - Purpose and Cost of a Departmental 360
3. Bonus: Create 2-3 Action Items for Chiefs to Take Back to Their Respective Agencies

Resources:

1. Internal Lexipol data/trends on lawsuit statistics
2. The Ruderman White Paper on Mental Health and Suicide of First Responders
3. FBHA

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), or “drones” are used for military intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and extended for civil aerial photography and videography for cinema, construction, and agricultural jobs. Similarly, drone usage has usefulness for public safety entities specifically firefighting. UAS support firefighting operations by providing a bird’s eye view of the fire scene, which gives firefighters and command staff real time information about how a fire is progressing. UAS can give firefighters a quick, safe way to capture intelligence related to catastrophic natural events like floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes to help with quicker response times in devastated areas. Situational awareness is imperative when it comes to fighting fires and saving lives, utilizing UAS to create Orthomosaic maps of critical infrastructure prior to an incident is key for locating critical entry and exits points. Capturing the entire incident from a high vantage point can provide firefighters and command staff with valuable information post incident for investigation purposes and for training purposes so everyone can improve their approach and response techniques while identifying future training needs. As an emergency responder, you’re familiar with complex standards, training requirements and the systems you use every day. Integrating UAS into your agency is a complex process which requires an agency to be truly committed to the integration process. The goal in the aviation profession is to have as close to no risk as possible. Ultimately, UAS is a force multiplier which increases the safety and effectiveness of a fire response while decreasing the risk to everyone on scene. A portion of this presentation will be devoted to the Evaluation of Online UAS Survey (April 2020)

In recent years there is growing evidence about the long-term consequences of brain injuries amongst Firefighters. Firefighters are repeatedly exposed to mechanical and blast brain injuries that can culminate in chronic unremittable cognitive decline, the so-called post-concussion syndrome. In addition, Firefighters are also being repeatedly exposed to severe emotional stress that can lead to the development of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The combination of these two types of brain injuries may contribute to the growing number of suicides amongst Firefighters who stand in the front of our civil society.

Clinical studies done in recent years present convincing evidence that hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) can be the coveted neurotherapeutic treatment for neurological incidents like traumatic brain injury and PTSD. This new understanding leads to a paradigm change in the way that we refer to chronic brain injuries; from now these should be thought of like other non-healing wounds in other parts of the body (e.g. non-healing leg ulcers). Even though many of the beneficial effects of HBOT can be explained by the improvement of tissue oxygenation, it is now realized that intermittent increase of oxygen concentration can induce many of the mediators and cellular mechanism that are usually induced during hypoxia but without the hazardous hypoxia, termed “The Hyperoxic-Hypoxic Paradox”. The intermittent hyperoxic exposure during HBOT can trigger stem cells proliferation, brain angiogenesis and neurogenesis.

In this lecture we will discuss the mechanisms and long-term consequences of brain injuries amongst fire fighters and the new approach to treating "brain wounds" with hyperbaric oxygen therapy. This new understanding and treatment strategy can bring hope to the growing number of brain-injured fire fighters who needs it.