firefighter health: pre-cooling
Pre-cooling to prevent heat illness Fire service instructors are at increased risk of ill health because of the number of fires they are exposed to, according to researchers at the University of Brighton. However, evidence suggests that pre-cooling with ice slurry could help to reduce the physiological strain caused by repeated exposures, reports Lotte Debell.
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rofessional sport has long understood the benefits of pre-cooling to reduce the occurrence of heat illness in athletes, but despite the fact that firefighters are exposed to far higher temperatures while enduring intense physical exertion, pre-cooling is not an established protocol in fire services. In part, this is down to the nature of emergency response – firefighters don’t know when or where they will be
The UK's Fire Service College has implemented special ice machines that dispence ice 'cubelets' to pre-cool its instructors.
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called to an incident, making preparation difficult – but that is not the case for all fire service personnel. There is a group more at risk of heat illness even than firefighters, and that is fire service instructors. Instructors can be exposed to multiple fires in a day, and without adequate preparation and recovery time and procedures, they could find themselves even more susceptible to some of the chronic and acute health conditions that tend to affect firefighters, including heat stress and cardiovascular illness. Around six years ago in the UK, when reports of ill health among fire service instructors raised a red flag with the Health Management Research Project for Live Fire Instructors, the Environmental Extremes Laboratory at the University of Brighton carried out a small pilot study to try to understand what was going on. The small-scale research project involved six instructors and six non-fire service individuals and found evidence that repeated exposure to live fires can cause changes in immune function, a decrease in aerobic fitness, and effects on lung function. A larger-scale study was called for, and this started with a survey of the working practices of both fire service instructors and firefighters across the UK. The results of this survey have just been published. ‘We wanted to find out what fire service instructors are experiencing, and whether this is unique to instructors,’ explains PhD researcher Emily Watkins from the University of Brighton, who designed the study. 130 instructors and 232 firefighters responded to the survey, and the responses enabled the researchers to identify the differences between the two groups. These include variations in the type and frequency of new symptoms reported and highlighted the increased risk faced by instructors. ‘From the survey, we found that 41% of instructors – a huge number – were experiencing new symptoms of ill health since becoming instructors.’
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