Carl J. Haddon
The spirit of the American emergency services volunteer seems to be alive and well, even though our numbers are dwindling quickly. Recruitment and retention are still the biggest challenges, with very few people having more (than less) time to volunteer. Volunteering requires a whole lot more of our time than it used to, and our collective pool of volunteers doesn’t seem to be getting any younger.
Ever-growing demands of time surrounding training, maintaining certifications, continuing education credits, and often having to travel for hours simply to find a certification testing site, simply works against volunteer agencies being able to grow and retain their numbers of volunteers.
In my very rural part of the country, we not only have our volunteer fire departments (of those, a number of which do not do any type of rescue or EMS work), we have two volunteer ambulance services, and a volunteer search and rescue service that handles all rescue and extrication calls. Imagine, if you will, the struggle for grant dollars to keep each of these three wonderful services afloat. If search and rescue is working a grant for a new rescue truck at the same time that one or more of the volunteer fire departments are working toward a new or newer apparatus, they’re often competing against each other for the same grant money.
A few weeks ago, our local county Emergency Services Director asked me if I’d help them toward obtaining an EMS grant, that was specifically funding new extrication tools. The grant is being administered by our state Health and Human Services. The requirements for the grant seemed straightforward enough to me, but as it would play out, nothing could have been further from the truth.
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The Emergency Services Director for our county asked me for my teaching credentials/IFSAC or Pro Board certs and my Curriculum Vitae (as I volunteer to teach fire/rescue/EMS classes for our organizations). After providing all that was asked of me, the gentlemen from State Health and Human Services said that I needed to provide them with a specific certificate that shows “I’m qualified to teach an operations level extrication program.”
To say I was flabbergasted with their reply would be putting it mildly. My Level 2 IFSAC/Pro Board instructor certs, 20-plus years as an instructor, and my 35-plus years in the career and volunteer fire and EMS service didn’t suffice? I called all over the country to other agencies and a host of fellow instructors asking if anyone had ever heard of such a thing. Nobody had. That was when I had to go back, re-read the email, and look to see who and what agency was administering this grant. Did I mention that it