By JoEllen Kelly

On May 31 and June 1, 2008, representatives from sixteen fire departments from across the United States gathered at the National Fire Academy for a two-day workshop on how to install a safety management system (SMS) within a fire department. A SMS is, at its most simplistic, an attempt to rationalize all safety programs within an organization to coordinate them into a system that both evaluates and predicts risks. It becomes a systematic, explicit, risk-management approach to minimizing the organization's known safety issues. With its predictive capability, a SMS is a powerful tool for avoiding (preventing) line-of-duty injuries or worse. Of the sixteen attending departments, four were tagged as "mentor" departments who would serve as models or mentors to the others who would be seeking guidance in the future.

For example, most fire departments in the United States have a group of safety policies and procedures ranging from very sophisticated firefighter physicals, to fireground accountability, to driver training programs. In other words, virtually all departments are aware that risks exist in the firefighter's environment that can be countered if known. This awareness of risks usually takes the form of producing policies and procedures which, in the beginning, lower the stress levels of managers who are responsible for firefighter safety but, in the end, do not create significant behavioral changes. It is only when all the safety initiatives are merged do we create tools that can be used by mangers and supervisors to create meaningful and permanent change.

The SMS model comes from the pharmaceutical and airline industries (among others, including hospitals) that were plagued by mistakes and near-misses which resulted in lost time, lost revenue and even the loss of lives in some cases. High-risk industries sought to systematically understand the connection between risk and accidents, and to mitigate what was happening in their environments that allowed risks to conclude in loss or accidents. High-risk industries began to evolve safety management systems in an attempt to preserve resources and (by the way) improve performance. SMS relies on goal-setting, planning, and measuring performance. Over time, it becomes woven into the fabric and culture of an organization, improving the way firefighters evaluate known risks and perform their jobs. The SMS typically focuses on the areas of leadership, policy, procedures, and practices of the organization. An SMS is holistic, dynamic, and can be integrated into every fire department activity.

The National Fallen Firefighters Foundation and the Everyone Goes Home® Program has identified the safety management system approach to have potential benefit to any fire departments seeking to improve outcomes and to greatly increase firefighter safety. At the workshop recently held in Emmitsburg, participants were asked to review the root causes of preventable firefighter injuries in their departments, and look at how these are influenced by attitudes, behaviors and beliefs about risk. Much of the first day was spent in a thorough review of how a safety management system could be installed in a fire department, including a presentation of models that have worked across the country. The model we have asked departments to consider is called PLAN-DO-CHECK-IMPROVE. The first day also asked the attending departments to make a commitment to developing and installing a safety management system within their own departments-to the greatest extent possible. One model from Montgomery County (MD) Fire-Rescue Service, called R-MAP, demonstrated how accidents, driving safety and behavioral change can be successfully united in an SMS environment.

Day two of the workshop consisted of a presentation and exchange of safety-related materials between the departments and an attempt to merge this material into a management system. It was hoped that the material shared will be scalable for a variety of fire departments.

Over the next year, the Everyone Goes Home® Program will contact the participating departments to see how their individual SMS are progressing. Departments were given material upon which to conduct surveys of their safety systems to identify gaps. The gap analysis of safety deficiencies will be followed by the implementation phase of the core SMS objectives. Over the next year, Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives team consultants, including the mentor departments, will work through problems with the other individual departments. At the end of one year, an FLSI team member, or one of the FLSI State advocates, will visit the department to conduct interviews and generally assess the SMS installation timeline.

If you have questions about fire department safety management systems, please contact JoEllen Kelly of the EGH program at 16FLSI@comcast.net. Also, please watch this newsletter and visit the EveryoneGoesHome.com website for SMS updates.