Fire Fighters Battle Inner Demons After Attending Medical Callout Onslaught
"Putting Out The Flames" (part 2): More than 9 years since Fire & Emergency NZ and St. Johns joined forces, the mental impact of traumatic medical callouts is being felt among senior fire fighters.
“Under-trained, inadequate, helpless sometimes, and you’ve got family members there crying and screaming, as Joe said that’s the worst day of their life, and people make, very seldom they ring 111. It’s very seldom they witness a family member going through a traumatic thing like that.”
These words come from Aaron McKay, the local NZPFU representative, when describing how it feels for fire fighters at incidents that St. John’s could not attend.
Pictured: Aaron McKay
Medical callouts numbers attended by the fire service in Canterbury have exploded. In 2011 there were just 151 jobs. By 2014 - a pivotal year as we will see -saw in 575 jobs, and by 2018 that number was eclipsed, with 742 callouts. The peak was reached in 2019 with 784 medical events. To 27 September last year, 526 jobs had been logged.
But the statistics mask the hidden injury that can accompany a single traumatic callout.
Fellow firefighter and National NZPFU President, Joe Stanley, recalls his own trials and tribulations.
“We’re trained to first aid, the lowest level of emergency response, medical response that can get trained to. But whatever we might go to, i might turn up to someone hanging in a tree because they’ve killed themselves, I might turn up to a chemical suicide. I might turn up to a multiple situation where a number of people like a murder-suicide.”
“I recently went to a train accident. I don’t if you heard in Heathcote there was a young man run over by a train. Fell asleep on the tracks, when he was intoxicated and he wasn’t very well at all.”
He continues.
“Well, I’ve turned up to lots of different things. Me personally in Wellington I once attended suicide of a pregnant woman who was aborting, miscarrying just after she’d died. Because obviously the body had died and miscarrying the baby. Yeah, absolutely horrendous. With first aid training, the same training retail workers at the supermarket have to do at the supermarket.”
Surprisingly, the heaviest mental toll is taken not on fire fighters in the first 10 years of their career but with experienced members who dealt with traumatic events.
“There is no training for that, there’s no resilience training, there’s no training in the world that can prepare you for that,” Aaron declares.
Both Aaron and Joe suggest taking a look a report created by a career fire fighter, Josh Darby. The 2023 “Whanaungatanga Wellbeing Survey” probed into the mental wellbeing and responses of Fire and Emergency NZ (FENZ) employees and the impact of supports.
“Because our problem isn’t necessarily - and they’re not immune to it - but our concerns are not necessarily with our younger people at that 1-10 year service. It’s actually an cumulative thing. so it’s actually our biggest concerns are from our - and again whether it’s from a point in time - our ten-year service plus. so it’s like the old glass being filled you know. A couple of drops here. And a couple of drops there. It’s not.”
The statistics produced for the Whanaungatanga report moderate to severe depressive symptoms and the likelihood of post-traumatic stress disorder features more notably amongst fire fighters who’ve stayed in the service for more than 10 years.
Source: The Whanaungatanga Wellbeing Survey (2023)
If by sheer coincidence, December the 2nd this year marks the 10-year anniversary since, “FENZ agreed to a memorandum of understanding with St Johns, so that if they couldn’t attend at-risk calls, so purple calls basically if no one responds there’ll be a loss of life.”
Prior to the 2014 memorandum, life for fire fighters was altogether different, explains Aaron. Referring over at to the wooden boards on the lunchroom wall, he says “so on these boards here you’ve got all of our retired members.”
“So if you go back to before 2014, so some of these guys could have done 30 years in the job and they may, yeah, so those guys have done 30, 40, 50 years and in that span of their career, some of those guys have performed CPR 3 times - I think that would be extreme for them in 30-40 years. We’ve got guys who could do it two times a day, five, six times a week, now. So that’s the difference, the mental challenges and everything that goes with that.”
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