About
The Challenge: A Changing Mission for Fire Departments
Most U.S. cities are served by all-hazards fire departments, staffed by fire personnel who provide a range of services to address and prevent medical, community health, safety, and fire emergencies. Traditionally, fire personnel rely on a combination of expert systems, organizational processes, and professional intuition honed through experience to identify and mitigate risks.
Today, fire departments are struggling to keep pace with a changing mission. 911 calls for diverse medical cases continue to rise, while budgets remain flat. Departments are searching for novel ways to prevent medical emergencies before they happen – mitigating risks upstream before they become chronic 911 calls and catastrophic events.
Fire-Based EMS and Risk Work
Fire-based Emergency Medical Services (EMS) represent a critical and expanding dimension of modern firefighting. Across the country, fire departments now respond to far more medical calls than fire calls, making EMS the primary operational mission for many departments. This shift has created new demands for how fire personnel identify, assess, and manage risks.
Risk work – defined as working practices framed by risk – encompasses how emergency services personnel:
- Identify risks at the individual, household, and community level
- Translate risk knowledge across organizational boundaries and information systems
- Manage risks through interventions that aim to prevent emergencies before they occur
For example, fire-based EMS programs like Community Paramedicine and Mobile Integrated Healthcare send specially trained personnel to follow up with frequent 911 callers, connect overdose patients to treatment services, and address social determinants of health before they become emergencies.
Data-Intensive Risk Work: Opportunities and Challenges
As information and communications technologies (ICTs) with expanded capabilities for data collection, storage, and advanced analytics become widely available, the risk work done by emergency services will evolve and transform. Emerging data-intensive IT offers the potential to advance risk work by augmenting practices of identifying risks, translating risk knowledge, and managing risks at the individual, organizational, and institutional level.
However, the tools and sociotechnical practices necessary to do so have been slow to come. Such tools and practices must be designed with careful attention to potentially negative, unintended consequences:
- For work practice: Increased data work burden on already-stretched personnel
- For workers: Increased disparities in risk knowledge between those with and without access to data tools
- For communities: Intensified surveillance of already-surveilled populations
Research Phases
Our project proceeds through three interconnected phases:
Phase 1: Ethnographic Research – We document current practices of risk work and risk-relevant data resources using in-depth ethnographic research in fire departments across different contexts in the U.S.
Phase 2: Co-Design – Working collaboratively with our field sites, we co-design speculative prototypes for data-intensive sociotechnical risk-work tools and practices.
Phase 3: Broad Evaluation – We bring design prototypes to a broad emergency services audience at national conferences to gather feedback and understand how our prototypes shift visions of the future for emergency services personnel.
Support
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
