Assessment of wildland firefighter opinions and experiences related to incident medical providers
Mark Hoffman
A * , Valerie Moody B , Viktor E. Bovbjerg C , Isabella Callis B and Zachary Snauer A
A Oregon State University, 226 Langton Hall, Corvallis, OR 97333, USA. Email: zsnauer@gmail.com
B University of Montana, 32 Campus Drive McGill Hall 205, Missoula, MT 59812, USA. Email: valerie.moody@umontana.edu, isabella.callis@umconnect.umt.edu
C Oregon State University, Milam Hall, Corvallis, OR 97333, USA.
International Journal of Wildland Fire 32(8) 1262-1268 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF22076
Submitted: 19 May 2022 Accepted: 13 May 2023 Published: 15 June 2023
© 2023 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of IAWF. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC)
Abstract
Background: Medical services for wildland fire incidents are vital and fire personnel need to be comfortable seeking care and have adequate access to care.
Aims: The aim of this study was to examine wildland firefighters’ (WLFFs) attitudes towards, opinions of and experiences with the medical services on fire assignments.
Methods: A survey was used to collect information from WLFFs. The survey covered: (1) demographics, (2) injury descriptions, (3) trust/respect toward medical personnel, and (4) perceived impact of injury treatment on individual and team deployability. Analysis used contingency tables with chi-square tests to compare groups.
Key results: WLFFs in both groups respect and trust incident medical personnel. Private firefighters compared with agency firefighters report a perception of less access to care, a high level of discouragement to seek care, and a greater concern that seeking care could result in being removed from the incident.
Conclusions: Although respect and trust are high, there are concerning perceived differences between groups on several aspects of seeking and receiving medical care.
Implications: Policy changes and culture shifts may be needed to narrow the opinion and perception gaps between private and agency firefighters on multiple aspects of incident medical services.
Keywords: access to care, injury prevention, injury reporting, occupational injury, respect, tactical athlete, trust, wildland firefighter.
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