Wildwood Fire Department Chief, Captain Attend FOCUS Seminar

WILDWOOD – Chief Daniel Speigel and Capt. Daniel Dunn were selected to attend the Firefighter Organizational Culture of Safety (FOCUS) seminar Sept. 19-20, in Chicago, Ill. 
According to a release, they represented one of 12 fire departments from throughout the country to attend. Until recently, the U.S. Fire Service lacked a reliable and valid instrument to measure its specific safety climate.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funded the Center for Firefighter Injury Research and Safety Trends (FIRST) at Drexel University to develop an industry-specific firefighter safety culture survey.
In 2016, Drexel University partnered with the Fire Department Safety Officers Association (FDSOA) and was awarded a FEMA Fire Prevention and Safety (FP&S) grant to move research into practice through the dissemination of the survey tool. To date over 400 fire departments have assessed with FOCUS. FOCUS provides fire departments with objective data to reduce injuries in the fire service.
All participating departments receive customized reports of their safety culture scores, and where applicable, scores by individual stations within their department. As appropriate, fire departments will be able to benchmark their scores to departments in their FEMA region and similar departments throughout the U.S.
The culture around safety in any organization is a predictor of injuries. Safety climate is the measurable aspect of organizational safety culture and has been used by other industries such as healthcare, construction, and manufacturing to gauge and improve safety performance.
The model for this project presumes that climate-outcome relationships are mediated by safety behavior. This framework reflects the evidence of the causal path that safety climate takes to impact organizational and safety outcomes.
Given the evidence regarding climate’s predictive validity, it follows that improvements in safety climate will result in subsequent improvements in safety behaviors along with a reduction of poor safety outcomes including near-misses, injuries, and line of duty deaths.
Recent research also finds that improvements to safety climate result in improvements to organizational outcomes – not traditionally thought of as ‘safety’ outcomes – such as turnover, job satisfaction, employee engagement, and morale.
“Because of this survey, its report and subsequent training, I believe it will enable our department to enhance its safety climate and safety behavior making for a healthier, safer and more productive workforce,” stated Speigel.