FENZ career firefighters co-respond with ambulance to immediately life-threatening calls.
St John Ambulance recently reported FENZ firefighters co-responded to 96 percent of all of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests.
When fire stations are closed, or fire trucks are unstaffed, firefighters have to come from further away to respond to life-threatening incidents where minutes can be the difference between life and death.
Firefighters and the 111 emergency centre dispatchers are exposed to high levels of trauma through medical response.
FENZ career firefighters have been co-responding to life-threatening medical events since 2013 but FENZ has never recognised the additional training and skills or properly addressed the impact on their health and wellbeing.
FENZ does not have a programme for appropriate mental health resilience training and is refusing to include medical response programmes in the collective agreement.
FENZ has refused to include baseline care in the firefighters’ collective agreement and says it will deliver psychological wellbeing programmes on an “ad hoc basis”.
FENZ is also refusing to commit to ongoing access to psychologists for those needing support from trained and qualified practitioners.
