As fire departments get larger and more complex, their safety may be at risk if new ways of communicating safety as a priority are not implemented
PHILADELPHIA — Safety climate—the shared perceptions of employees regarding their organization’s safety protocols—has been identified as a predictor of both safety behaviors and organizational outcomes.
The Center for Firefighter Injury Research and Safety Trends (FIRST) conducts research examining the role of safety climate in the United States fire and rescue service with their Fire service Organizational Culture of Safety (FOCUS) survey. To date, this survey has been administered in over 600 US fire departments and has allowed FIRST to empower them with important data.
As an extension of this work, a new study entitled ‘Size matters: How safety climate and downstream outcomes vary by fire department organization type’ was published in Injury Epidemiology. This research, led by PhD student Ashley Geczik, MPH, and other members of the FIRST team, used FOCUS data to examine how fire department organization type impacts safety climate and other downstream organizational outcomes, like burnout, engagement, and job satisfaction. This research distinguishes between career, volunteer, and combination fire and rescue departments in a geographically stratified random sample of the fire and rescue service (n=125).
Findings indicate that Management Commitment to Safety—how supported rank-and-file feel by management—varies by fire department organization type, with career departments showing lower average scores than volunteer departments. Career departments tend to have larger employee roster sizes, call volumes, and population served than combination or volunteer. Therefore, the authors posit that rank-and-file may be less likely to interact with management regularly and this may be driving the lower scores.
Additionally, this research compared department scores on Supervisor Support for Safety, which indicates how supported rank-and-file feel by their supervisors. In contrast to Management Commitment, Supervisor Support scores were 10 points higher on average and did not vary by organization type. While future studies will investigate why Management Commitment scores decline in career departments, the authors conclude that supervisors, also known as company-level officers, are doing a good job regarding safety no matter what department type they are in.
As the study demonstrated, safety climate is a known predictor of injuries, burnout, job satisfaction, and adherence to safety protocols, these findings point to important organizational opportunities for change. As fire departments get larger and more complex, their safety may be at risk if new ways of communicating safety as a priority are not implemented.
This article was a collaboration between the FIRST Center’s Ashley Geczik, MPH, Andrea Davis, MPH, and Dr. Jennifer Taylor from Drexel University, as well as Dr. Jin Lee from Kansas State University’s Department of Psychological Sciences and Dr. Joseph Allen from the University of Utah Health.
For more information, please contact Victoria Gallogly, Outreach & Communications Coordinator vhg25@drexel.edu