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Mankkinen, J. (2001) FIREFIGHTERS’ CAREER PLANNING, http://www.fitting-in.com/mankkinen2.htm |
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FIREFIGHTERS’ CAREER PLANNING University of Kuopio 28.5.2001 Teija Mankkinen Nordic Study Days for the Firefighters, Helsinki 2001 |
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Background
The object of the work of Finnish fire fighters has become broader during the last decades. Only twenty years ago, the work day of a fire fighter consisted of extinguishing real fires and transporting patients to the hospital by ambulance. Nowadays, fire fighters are officially called rescuers. They are expected to give patients an instant care in the place of an accident, to rescue people, property and animals, to put out fires and to instruct citizens in fire prevention. To conclude, the Finnish rescuer has to be able to transform himself from an obedient member of a team to an individual hero, who is willing to encounter danger; from an instant-care nurse to a fellow who comfort the patient in his/her grief and from a leader of an operation to a mother of a family, who takes care of all little details around.
While thinking about career alternatives it is important to pay attention to and work community and its values. In the case of rescuers the work community can be depicted as a closed or a total system operated by strict control and rules. In their work community the Finnish rescuers’ social relationships go beyond the usual status of an acquaintance. The nature of the work makes rescuers create a special type of communality: one has to know how one’s work mate behaves in a crisis situation, because one’s own life may depend on him. One Finnish fire-fighter depicted his work as follows:
”Fire brigade is in many aspects as army, where men polish their social skills together. There are not many professions in which men actually do live. Of course this is work, but this is also living: it is interacting with themselves so far, so deep. Especially when the nature of work is such that in the end my life may be on your hands. There is something very deep in this work. The deepness of this work means that it goes beoynd the limits. When ever two fire fighters meet the nature of their profession – an ability to across the limits - unites them together universally. All European book keepers are not united, neither are the cooks. It is nothing like that. Rather there is one aspect in fire fighter’s work which distinguishes it from others. It is a necessity to put one’s own safety at the stake. And when one’s own safety is put to a severe test, then it unites them, who it experiences together. (pem2,270201)
The reliability of one’s own community is a precondition of the work activity, for the object of work, or the patient constitutes the factor of uncertainty. It has been shown that the ability to maintain one’s face or reputation in the work community explains the negative stress reactions of rescuers better than the fear of fire. At the moment, Finnish fire fighters are recovering from two strikes in the 90s, which divided fire fighters and changed the nature of communality. With these strikes, rescuers fought against the raising of the retirement age, but lost their battle: The Finnish rescuers’ retirement age was raised to 65 years. This means that the average age of rescuers is rising year by year.
The question of retirement age is closely related to rescuers’ work communality and their attitudes concerning dignified retirement. The question of what the rescuers in their 40s, 50s and even 60s can do is acute, because it has been shown that already a 45-year-old rescuer has to be a top condition to smoke dive. No matter what is thought about the present retirement age, new ways to think about a career and work tasks of rescuer are needed as soon as possible. The changes in nature and demands of rescue work and on the other hand shortage of money forces rescuers look their work in a new light.
About the project
From a hero to a survivor (pelastajasta selviytyjäksi) – which is the name of this rescuer’s career planning project began - at the beginning of January. The project is national and it lasts two years. There are three fire brigades in a project: Helsinki, Vaasa and Kuusamo. and it is financed by The Fire safety fund and City of Helsinki rescue department. The funding is appropriated to the University of Kuopio, which is my employer (not Helsinki Rescue Services as mentioned in a programme). Besides me there are two other persons working in this project: senior researcher Sirpa Lusa who works in The Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and works in this project as a part time researcher and professor Veikko Louhevaara, who is a leader of the project. The project belongs to Action program in Safety occupations located in Finnish Institute of Occupational Health. The idea of the program is to look for co-operation possibilities among safety occupations. Also The Emergency Services College is together in collaboration with our project.
We are trying to figure out what kind of career paths could be developed for rescuers in order to make sure that every rescuer has a possibility for dignified retirement in as good shape as possible. Already now there are work shifts with quite a many rescuers who are not able do all demanded work tasks due to some kind of physical injury or ageing. However they are not drawn a pension, because their injury or situation is not severe enough. Besides the personal stress caused to those who have lost partly their work ability, the situation stresses the rescuers in the same work shift. In practice we are in the situation, where the work load is divided by fewer men and also them are in a risk of exhaustion.
The idea of the project is to find new ways to develop and reform rescuers work together with rescuers themselves. There is no point to force rescuers do tasks which are against their abilities or their ways of doing things, rather we are trying to develop career paths or alternatives using rescuers’ present work and communality as a starting point. All career alternatives - both inside rescue departments and also outside them – are taken into serious consideration.
The aims of the project are:
develop rescuers’ career planning model
à focus is on a whole career: from the first work day to the date of retirement
develop new rescuer career paths, which are experienced interesting and motivating among rescuers
develop and experiment new work tasks suitable especially aged rescuers
develop tools which would help rescue community to handle rescuers ageing and future changes
find new information for training
How we have worked and what we have done so far?
This project applies among others the approach of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, which emphasises the local construction of macro-level changes. According to this framework, the changes of the rescuing profession are interpreted and constructed in the activity of the participants in actual rescuing and instant-care practices. The change is not given in the beginning, but defined and made visible by the practitioners themselves.
We have started our work with one work shift (about 20 guys) in one station in Helsinki. Our work has started at the beginning of March and now we have two meetings left. Meetings have been held every week and each has lasted about two hours.
According to the Activity theory the starting point of the discussions must be found in a concrete work – the closer the better, and the topic must be commonly accepted in the group. In our group the topic was the relation between ambulance work and fire fighting work. The rescuers in the group experienced that fire fighting had forgotten on behalf of ambulance work. The topic suited well, because it irrevocably led us to discuss about rescuers’ every day work and its changes.
The main question seemed to be what a rescuer really do
during their work shift. If we look at the statistics of City of Helsinki
Rescue Department it is shown, that 83
% of alarms consisted of ambulance work and only about 3 % of alarms are
extinguishing real fires. To go on 64 % of alarms are caused by false automatic
alarms. To make it simple the situation and contradictions can be depicted as
follows with a triangular model.
Subject: Rescuer
vs. nurse Object
of work: Rescuing
vs. nursing Tools
of work Fire
engine vs. ambulance Rules: Commanding vs negotiating Community: One
community vs. many communities Division
of work: Broad
responsibility vs. deep and narrow responsibility
So is the rescuer really rescuer any more or has his main task to take care of ambulance and instant care work ? How the work load can be divided with justice in a situation where ageing does not any more level out unequal division of work load as happened earlier? How rescuers can remain motivated their work in spite of their different skills and abilities?
In the group we have tried to figure things out together by looking back to history and searching the nature of changes in fire fighters’ work. And the change has definitely occured!
Instant
care training, education Based
on experience
Fire
soldier rescuer ”family” No
strict rules; personal responsibility Automatic alarms, instant
care divided Hierarcic & participated model
together Hierarcic division
of labour Strict
rules Real fires, ambulance
One example of a change is a fire fighter’s tittle. As late as at the beginning of 80s fire fighter was called a fire soldier. After that the tittle was changed to fire fighter and nowadays the official tittle is rescuer. However the change has happened almost unnoticeable and rescuers have just tried to cope with changes. No wonder the rescuers of today are struggling with questions like what are the main work tasks and priorities of rescuers.
The contradictions are seen as an impetus of changes in the Activity theory. The difficulty is how these contradictions can be made visible and how they can be used fruitfully. In order to locate contradictions different kind of material is collected and used as a mirror to show participants their realistic situation. Often people develop myths to hide behind in order to reject the changes. With a help of a mirror material myths are to be teared apart and a realistic view of a present situation is starting to construct. In our group we have collected statistics of different things and different periods of times, we have created lists of work tasks in one work shift etc. What ever material which has helped us to see the real picture. To conclude the first phase in this method is to built an over view of the present situation together with participants and a second phase is to develop tools or ways to over come those contradictions found in the first phase.
This project has lived only half a year so it’s too early to say anything about results yet. One thing I can say for sure: the discussions and debates held in the group have been very useful and they offer lots to think about for a future. It has already been an achievement to get rescuers talk about problems and contradictions in their own work and community with the real names. The more local solutions and new ways of action we try and collect in our project the better.
After we have finished the first change laboratory -