Looking back, looking forward: marking 20 years of Fire Related R&D

Professional Development

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Looking back, looking forward: marking 20 years of Fire Related Research and Developments

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FIRE Correspondent Catherine Levin reports from the 20th anniversary of the Fire Related Research and Developments (RE16) event held at West Midlands Fire Service Headquarters on November 15. It also saw the tenth presentation of the FIRE Magazine/ Gore Research Excellence Awards

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“That is the strength

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of the fire research event: there are plenty of people

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r Anne Eyre confessed during her opening speech to having been at the very first fire research event in 2006. While she looked slightly sheepish about her admission, actually she was at the start of something that has now grown into a key event in the fire calendar.

Hosted for the first time at West Midlands Fire Service Headquarters, the fire research event attracts a wide range of Fire Service professionals and academics.

Dr Eyre announced: “The conference has always attracted interest and presentations from our international colleagues and this year is no exception. The eclectic profile of our attendees – in terms of background, nationality, subject matter interest, academic discipline and organisational role – continues to be a unique feature of this event.”

The research at RE16 covered a wide spectrum of subject matter. One of the special aspects of fire research events is the forum it provides for researchers that are only partially available through their research. Being able to set out ideas, test concepts and gauge reaction is an important aspect of the research journey and RE16 was no exception.

Chris Hastie is a case in point. He comes from a local government background and is now doing a PhD with Coventry University. At the tail end of his research and taking a well-earned break from writing, he shared his work on how hyperlocal communities respond to fire safety messages.

Using the wonderful interactive presentation tool Prezi, Chris questioned the current approach to community fire safety. He introduced a research method called ‘deep hanging out’. This is a term coined by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz in 1988 and is defined as ‘immersing oneself in a cultural group or social experience on an informal level’.

By spending time in a small community in northeast Coventry, Chris sought to discover

looking at the Fire and Rescue Service who are not or do not come from a Fire and Rescue Service background”

why ‘marked inequalities in the distribution of dwelling fires throughout society continue to exist’. He found people who were deeply mistrustful of uniformed services, unaware of preventative services and fearful of the consequences of engaging with any public authority.

He argued for a more light touch approach to community fire safety work; he asked if the home fire safety visit (HFSV) was the best option. Chris’s work goes against the trend in the Fire and Rescue Service where the HFSV has morphed into more detailed and longer health focused Safe and Well intervention. However, he did preface this with some thoughts about context and an acknowledgement that there is no one size fits all solution.

Chris’s research does not look into the rights and wrongs of the policy decisions made by fire and rescue services, but it does provide some useful food for thought as community fire safety evolves now and in the future.

It is research like Chris’s that should be considered by strategic leaders in the Fire and Rescue Service; there might not be agreement, but looking at areas of work through a different lens can be incredibly helpful.

And that is the strength of the fire research event: there are plenty of people looking at the Fire and Rescue Service who are not or do not come from a Fire and Rescue Service background. There were presenters from many different universities: Kent, Nottingham, Nottingham Trent, Cardiff, Coventry, Chester, Edinburgh, Loughborough, London South Bank and Kingston. And they were further enhanced with returning presenters from Canada’s Vancouver Island University.

There were also some recent escapees from the Service: Phil Butler has swapped his London Fire Brigade borough commander hat for the mortarboard of higher education. He has just started work on a PhD at the University of January 2017 | www.fire–magazine.com | 43

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Professional Development

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Gore’s Gordon Burns; Best Poster Award winner Bill Gough; Best Presentation Award winners Geoff Spriggs and Leigh Blaney from Canada; and FIRE Editor Andrew Lynch present the FIRE/Gore Research Excellence Awards for the tenth year

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Cardiff. He is fascinated by incident command and has previously been involved with the development of the National Operational Guidance in this area as well.

Phil’s research is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and Cardiff University’s School of Psychology and is endorsed by the Chief Fire Officers Association. It aims to identify non-technical skills of fire incident commanders and develop a behavioural marker system so that these skills can be assessed during training and emergencies.

It is work like this that has the potential to lead to generational change in the way fire and rescue services provide incident command training and assessment and impact safety outcomes. As a result of his approach and the potential impact of his work, the organisers have asked Phil to return to a future event to provide an update on his work and show how it has developed.

In complete contrast, Alex Mills from South Yorkshire Fire Service presented the results of his work using ‘nudge theory’ to improve public response to fire safety messages. He shared the work he has been doing with a small number of services to work out what wording needs to be used in letters to encourage behaviour change – in this instance, persuading people to check their smoke alarms.

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It does not sound like much, but the world of behavioural economics is all about these small ‘nudges’ to make changes to long-term behaviour and it is great to see the Fire and Rescue Service trying out some new techniques in this area.

Alex remarked later that he had enjoyed attending and presenting at RE16 and that he was surprised at how accessible the day was; this just shows that anyone with an interest in fire research can come along and learn something new.

These examples just give a flavour of the kind of research on offer at RE16. The full programme was published in the November edition of FIRE. Recognising Excellence During the day, FIRE and colleagues from Gore were busy taking notes to decide who were going to be the winners of the prestigious FIRE magazine/Gore Research Excellence Awards.

For ten years, FIRE magazine and Gore have supported the research event by recognising the most captivating research projects. There are two awards: one for the best presentation and one for the best poster.

It was a tough decision as there was some excellent research presented at RE16. However, one presentation stood out as it showed the journey from research previously presented at

Professional Development

“It is work like this that has the potential to lead to generational change in the way fire and rescue services provide incident command

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training and assessment and

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impact safety outcomes”

achieve: demonstrating that there has been a real progression from something academic to something practical.

In addition to awarding the best presentation, FIRE and Gore also recognises the contribution made to RE16 by the posters. For the uninitiated, these are literally posters around A2 in size that set out to capture the essence of a research project. This is a tough thing to do and there was a wide range of approaches taken by the presenters.

The winner of this year’s best poster was Bill Gough, who after retiring from the Fire and Rescue Service in 2013 is now a PhD candidate at Coventry University. His poster was called: ‘The moment of choice: a human factors analysis of firefighter injury sustained during emergency response operations’.

The judges praised his poster as a clearly laid out set of ideas that used a very modern approach to sharing information with the lay reader. It was accessible and readable: it left the reader wanting to find out more, which is just what a poster should do.

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RE12 to its implementation four years later.

Geoff Spriggs, Assistant Chief of Langford Fire and Rescue Service on Vancouver Island and Leigh Blaney, a professor at Vancouver Island University, won this year’s award.

The title of the award winning research is ‘Enhancing firefighter resilience: the journey from research to action’. This research explores Canadian and UK fire and rescue services’ experience of distress, coping and resilience related to workplace traumatic events. The study looks at the resilience of firefighters and how firefighters define resilience.

“Firefighters are not sick and do not need to be fixed,” argued Leigh. The essence of this research is that the language and approach to dealing with firefighters who experience trauma through their exposure at work is too much about managing illness and not enough about enhancing health and resilience.

She talked about the importance of leadership and that principal officers should be role models by demonstrating healthy lifestyles and stress management practices and be open to discussing their own approaches.

Leigh promoted ‘stigma-busting’ campaigns into general stress and critical incident stress education, encouraging all staff to talk openly about mental health and for services to post stress management information in high-traffic areas of fire stations. These strategies will serve, she argued, to raise the profile of managing stress as a positive action.

What is great about Leigh and Geoff’s research is that it is international; it looks at two countries and finds many similarities. Leigh and Geoff have returned to the UK and presented progress to RE16 after four years of developing ideas about effective strategies for introducing change in the workplace. This is exactly the kind of thing that this event was intended to

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The state of research reprised

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The state of research in the Fire and Rescue Service was discussed in the March edition of FIRE and post RE16 it is timely to reflect on those thoughts from earlier this year he quieter, reflective work of researchers and statisticians can seem unexciting and uncontroversial. Yet the impact of evidence-based research, using rigorous academic methodologies can lead to important changes in policy across the increasingly diverse remit of fire and rescue services.’

This article painted a gloomy picture of research, bemoaning the loss of the fire research division in DCLG (now Home Office).

Highlighting a beacon of light in an otherwise depressing scene, the fire research event was cited as ‘a well-established channel for disseminating new ideas’.

However, the article went on to caution that, ‘unless those new ideas are harnessed and channeled into a direction that makes sense for the Service overall, it is not actually dealing with the problems’.

In part, those problems are that there is a lack of strategic direction for developing the research to underpin the need for evidence-based policy making for the Fire and Rescue Service in the future. While it is good to see the creation of the R&D Hub at the Fire Service College, it is restricted to research into equipment and does not embrace the kind of longitudinal research that is shared at the fire research event.

It is not for the organisers of RE16 to remedy this problem, but it certainly needs considering and is perhaps something for the new National Fire Chiefs Council when it is formed in April 2017.

Maybe at RE17 there will be a new emphasis on the importance of a strategic research programme for the Fire and Rescue Service.

Is that a piece of award winning research for the future?

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