Episode 72: Redefining ROI with Annette Zapp, CSCS*D
Guess what!?!
It's my podcast-versary! Congrats to me and my main genius producer, Jeremiah, for a whole year of shows!
I'm never going to try to monetize the podcast by begging for money with a button, but if you've ever wondered how to support me or the show, here's your way. Jeremiah was recently robbed of his sound equipment, including his hard drives. He lost several thousand dollars in gear, and his friends have also suffered losses. If you're inclined and able, please donate to the go-fund-me set up to help him and his friends. I'd appreciate it so much.
Support Jeremiah and his friends!
Today, I riffed on Return on Investment (ROI) for health and wellness programs and how we should measure it in value instead of dollars. The goal is to give you language and perspective when requesting that your department provide resources.
So what, now what?
We KNOW that health and wellness interventions work. We KNOW they improve quality of life and provide value. Let's focus on that instead of whether we will get a $1.50 or $15 return on our investment!
Click here for the research from the episode!
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[00:00:00] Hey listeners, it's AZ. Welcome to the podcast. And I'm going to tell you something. I'm really excited today. Today is the one-year anniversary of the Fire Rescue Wellness Podcast. I cannot believe that it's already a year. And this is episode number 72. And for the one-year episode, I decided to make it a solo episode.
I'm going to recap a little bit of the topic that I spoke about at the NSCA tactical annual meeting that I just got back from a few weeks ago. But before we get to that, I wanted to sincerely thank my man, Jeremiah. Jeremiah is I never quite know what to call him. He's the wizard. He's the sound engineer.
He's the [00:01:00] producer of the podcast. He's just magical. And let me tell you, he is a damn nice human being. I really enjoy working with Jeremiah. It's been just a little over a year when I met him at the studio downtown Chicago. And so I wanted to say not only happy podcastversary to me, but happy podcastversary to my man Jeremiah as well.
Before, this is going to be a long intro today. I'm just going to tell you that from the get go, but before I get to the story that I'm going to tell you before we get to the episode, I want to ask you a really big favor. I know that a lot of people monetize their podcasts, either with sponsorships or these buttons like buy me something and I don't love that. That feels icky to me and so I've never attempted to monetize my podcast [00:02:00] that way and I will not in the future monetize my podcast that way, but I do want to ask you a favor today. If you do have a couple extra bucks. My man, Jeremiah, last weekend was involved in an event where a car where he had a lot of his sound equipment, his hard drives and things like that, this car was stolen and eventually they did find the car, but everything inside all of Jeremiah and his friends belongings, of course, had been pilfered.
And he had a good amount of money invested in that equipment that he's now gonna have to replace. And so I'm gonna put a link in the show notes. There's a GoFundMe for Jeremiah and his friends. And so if you've ever thought like, how could I support AZ? This is what I'm going to ask you to do, please just, if you have a dollar or five or 10, if you wouldn't mind [00:03:00] donating to the GoFundMe for Jeremiah, that would actually mean the world to me, I'd really appreciate it.
With that said, I wanted to give you a little bit of a life update. As most of you probably know already, I moved out of my home that I've lived in almost 20 years. I'm in a rental townhome. And I'm going to this commercial gym, which is, it's not great. I don't love it, but I have been able to make myself go by making myself a shit sandwich.
And so the shit sandwich goes like this. I walk to the gym, which I enjoy tremendously. I go to the gym, which I despise because of all the weirdness that goes on there. And then I walk home. So it's, good, bad, good. There's the shit sandwich. And. In my walks to the gym, I've had the opportunity to meet a few let's be honest, dogs.
Okay. I don't want to meet humans. I want to meet dogs, but when you meet the dogs, sometimes you meet the humans. And [00:04:00] so I did meet a really nice dog named Lila and her owner, Vince is very nice man. So I've run into him, I don't know, a handful of times, five or six times, and I just ran into them last night.
And then I ran into them this morning when I was on the way to the gym. So I stopped to chat a little bit. Vince was telling me a funny story. He had actually just rescued a lost dog. Lila had alerted him that there was a dog in the trees and he was able to grab it. And then eventually I think they scanned it for the chip and found the owner, which was great.
And so while Vince was telling the story, Lila started to alert again. She was, her ears up, nose pointed, and she started to bark. And we looked, and there's this little tiny Yorkie running down the middle of the street. No owner chasing it. I could tell I mean from even the distance It didn't have a collar on so Vince and I decided we needed to catch this dog. [00:05:00] Now, you know, I had a knee replacement in June.
So here's me with the knee replacement and Vince is on a scooter with Lila in tow. So we began chasing this dog and of course it runs away from us. Vince stops me. He's Hey, I have treats, take these treats. So I actually went, I ran after this dog. I got it to take a treat out of my hand.
And then when I went to grab it tried to bite me. Now I, it's only a Yorkie. I get it, but also I don't want to get bit by a dog. I have a threshold and the threshold is don't bite me. And although I had a hold of it for a second it wiggled away because I was scared I was going to get bit.
Then the dog takes off again, I'm chasing the dog again. Get the dog slowed down, dog takes a treat again, and just then this car starts driving by. So the dog is very close to me, I try to grab it, it slips my grasp, goes running [00:06:00] into the middle of the street, so now I'm running into the middle of the street trying to stop this SUV, screeching tires ensued the dog did not get hit, luckily.
And the poor lady is rolling down her window sobbing. Please tell me I didn't hit the dog. I'm like no, you're fine. You're fine. Also, this isn't my dog. I didn't want her to think I was an irresponsible dog owner. This isn't my dog. So we're chasing and chasing this dog and. Actually, I asked Vince, I said, I feel a lot better if I had like a blanket or a small towel or something to grab, and he's like, how about a shopping bag?
So now I'm chasing the dog with treats in one hand, shopping bag in the other. Vince and Lila chasing, we're all chasing the dog. This goes on for, I would say, I can't give you a time frame, but I think that we chased this dog for around two miles, TWO MILES. And finally, Vince is Hey, you know what? I'm gonna see if Lila can help.
And so he let her off leash and [00:07:00] Lila is so smart. She's husky Labrador, but she also, I suspect she may be part border collie because she is a herding animal. And so Lila actually herded the dog, right in someone's front yard, herded the dog towards me and I was able to grab it in the shopping bag with the shopping bag, I should say.
And then once I had it in my arms, we’re situated and actually put the dog in the shopping bag. So now I'm holding a smelly Yorkie, growling Yorkie, in a shopping bag. What are we gonna do now? Vince calls Animal Control, they're closed on the weekends. Calls police, non emergency line I guess non emergencies don't happen on the weekends either.
So we start walking, maybe we're gonna take this dog to the vet, get it scanned for the chip. We just really don't know what to do, other than Lila's a hero right now. We finally post up at this intersection.[00:08:00] In the interim, every person that I come across, I'm saying, do you recognize this dog?
And no one recognizes the dog. So we finally post up at an intersection. Vince breaks down, just calls 9 1 1, explains. No, it's not an emergency. However, we have this situation. And there's this boy. Maybe man he's probably 18, but I could tell he autistic individual very very much focused on his walk and I'm like, should I ask him?
Should I ask him? Should I ask him? Okay, I'm going to ask him. I said, excuse me, do you happen to know who this dog might belong to? And I said, He actually, he stops and he thinks, and then he says, yes, I think it's the XYZ name. He says the name and, do you want here? I can give you a map. Do you want me to get my mom. I was like no, that's okay. The police are already coming. We'll let them know that you think the dog belongs to X, Y, Z family and [00:09:00] then he's, he's yes, but I can give you a map. He's very persistent. And so we finally, we invited him to wait with us and he said, no, I have to go home.
So he went home. We're waiting. maybe 10 or 15 minutes. Police haven't shown up yet. And a guy has ridden by a couple times on his bike. And at this point, my arm is getting tired from holding this like isometric bicep curl of the Yorki in a shopping bag. And so I hand the dog to Vince and the guy rides by again.
He goes, is that Lucy? And we're like we don't know. Is it Lucy? He comes over and he's Oh my gosh, this is my dog. I've been looking for her. Now I'm suspicious. I'm suspicious because it just doesn't feel right. And so I say to him, Are you by chance the XYZ family? And he goes, Yeah, I am. I said, Oh, okay.
The kid two houses down told us it might be your dog. Anyway, Lucy is 18 years old. She's blind and deaf and no wonder [00:10:00] she didn't want to be chased or picked up by me. Anyway, the long and the short story is my walk gym walk turned into walk. Save a dog, walk home, like an hour and a half later.
I didn't even get to the gym. I'll probably try to go later. But anyway, so that was more than enough daily dose of dog for me today. And I'm calling that my Lila Adventure, Lila, the Herding Dog Adventure. Thanks to Lila. Lucy is home and safe. All right. We're already 11 minutes into the podcast and we haven't even started on the information yet.
So here we go. As I mentioned I presented recently at the tactical annual training, the NSCA training. It was held in Las Vegas. It was a great meeting. Ran into a lot of old friends, made some new ones. It was wonderful. I was really honored to speak on [00:11:00] Friday on a topic that's really important to me, return on investment.
And I titled my talk, defining, I'm sorry, redefining return on investment, prioritizing quality of life. Because here's the thing, when you invest in something, when you invest in basically anything, you want to make sure that you are spending your money wisely. I get that when I buy a car, I want to make sure that I'm getting a good deal and then it's going to be safe for me and it's going to last a long time and the doors aren't going to rust through in two years and I just want to know I'm getting value for my money and it's not so much a return on investment with the car, but it's just, I'm spending money wisely.
But when we talk about health and wellness, [00:12:00] especially through the lens of a fire department spending money on resources, whether it be coaches, whether it be gym memberships, whether it be educational lectures, whatever it is, we tend, or fire departments tend to get really twitchy about spending money.
And so the overarching goal for my talk more than anything was to give the audience participants some language that they could use in their messaging when they are trying to educate or convince fire departments to invest in their personnel. And so one of the first things that I brought up when I began my talk was I had attended a [00:13:00] breakfast that same week.
And Alex Morrow, who is, he's Mops and Moes on Instagram. He was one of the 15 minute speakers at this breakfast event. But what he said, and this is regarding the military, but it also applies to police and fire. He said, “We need fitness to overcome the negative impacts of the job. But at the same time, the job directly interferes with us being fit.”
The schedule, the sleep deprivation, the stress, the trauma, the, for police officers sitting in their cars for hours on end for firefighters, the gear that restricts our movement and gets us overheated and all of those things interfere with our fitness and our wellness. So we need fitness for the job, but the job is actively [00:14:00] fighting against us.
And so the next, the other thing that I shared was this non monetary return on investment matters to me a lot because I like to remind people that although I am a biochemist by degree and a strength and conditioning coach and a nutritionist by credential and a firefighter by trade, the reason I'm a business owner is because I found what really broke my heart, and through what broke my heart, I found my purpose, and my purpose is to take care of firefighters, because when you think about it, we take a young man or woman, a civilian, they raise their right hand, they promise to protect and serve lives and property, and they spend their entire career taking care of other people while [00:15:00] not taking the best care of themselves.
They put everyone, but themselves first. No one, including them, is really taking care of the firefighter. And as you probably know, if you've been listening to this podcast for any amount of time, there's four main ways that we are losing our firefighters. Cardiovascular disease complications, so heart attack and stroke and other complications of cardiovascular disease.
We're losing them through cancer, we're losing them through suicide, and we're losing them through I guess we would call it industrial accidents. Whether it's motor vehicle accidents on the job or things such as falling off a roof or something of that nature, those are the 4 ways that we're losing firefighters.
And the thing that will really [00:16:00] should just make your socks roll up and down, is that simply by addressing sleep…not even, let's just not even think about nutrition and physical fitness training and mental health interventions. Let's just talk about sleep. Simply improving firefighter’s sleep will help improve their mortality risk for all of those four things.
Sleep deprivation is an independent risk factor for all of those four things. And so simply providing education and support on sleep as somewhere to start would be a tremendous help. The other thing that I'd also like you to consider, when I got hired almost 20 years ago, we were doing something called a consortium.
Consortium, I think it's called a consortium and more or less departments got together, whether it was 3 or 6 or 12 departments, they all [00:17:00] got together and they had a test together. They administered the same test and then those results went to all of the departments for them to create their hiring lists.
And I believe the process that I participated in, there were around 600 people taking the test. They had to do it in two waves because the hall couldn't accommodate all 600 people. So there was like a noon and a two or something like that. So 600 applicants. And... I was on several lists from that test and I did get hired from that list.
I was very lucky there were a good amount of people hired off of that list at my department because we were standing up another paramedic unit. So we automatically needed, I think, 9 or 12 additional people just to stand up that paramedic unit. And then we had a fair amount of retirements. And so I don't know, [00:18:00] maybe 15 people got hired from that list, which was a lot.
It was not unheard of for 600 people to show up to a test and, be on the list for five departments and three out of the five departments never hired anyone. So it was really tough to get a job in firefighting two decades ago. Our most recent test, if I'm not mistaken, had 19 applicants. And we were trying, I think, to hire 8 and I think we got 6 and the list is already.
exhausted. And so recruitment and retention is another challenge that we are facing, at least in Illinois. So there's a couple pieces of it. Here's how we know our firefighters are losing their lives. Here are their mortality risks. And also it's becoming increasingly more difficult to recruit and retain [00:19:00] firefighters.
Let's move on to most of you probably listening are firefighters, so you probably identify with this, but here's the avatar of the typical veteran firefighter. If you've been on the job 20 to 25 years, more than likely, you had either military experience first. Or you came from the trades. And so maybe you were an electrician, maybe you were a plumber, maybe you were in the army, but the fire service was a destination career for military in the trades.
You more than likely have a type A personality. I like to say if you don't have a type A personality, you're probably not going to survive in the fire service. More than likely, if you were on the job 20, 25 or more years, you didn't have higher education coming into the fire service. You may have gotten an [00:20:00] associate's or a bachelor's or heck, even a PhD while you were in the fire service, but more than likely, you didn't have that education prior.
If you've been on the job 20, 25, 30 years, you have accumulated a lot of sleep deprivation. You've accumulated a lot of trauma. And the last thing is if you've been on the job this long, you probably operate under the mantra of a hundred years of tradition unimpeded by progress. So that's the typical veteran firefighter.
And those veteran firefighters grow up to be chiefs. And so that's typically the avatar of a chief as well. Former military or trade, type A personality, may or may not have higher education at this point, had a lot of sleep deprivation and trauma, and a hundred years of tradition unimpeded by progress.
So now let's break [00:21:00] down the avatar of a peer fitness trainer. So most of these people are very passionate about fitness, or they're very interested in fitness, and some of them volunteer, they step up, they raise their hand, they say, I want to be involved because I want to make things better, and this interests me, and some of them are voluntold.
You, over there, who ran a marathon last weekend, you look like you know what you're doing. You're in charge of the fitness program. The typical peer fitness trainer. does not have education related to fitness other than potentially attending a week long certification course. Typically, they don't have education.
You're not going to have a master's in kinesiology for the most part and be a peer fitness trainer because here's the other thing. If you have that education and you're on a [00:22:00] department, you're already handcuffed because as we know, it's very difficult to be a prophet in your own kingdom.
Most of these peers are not provided with time, compensation, or support. It's more or less figure it out in your downtime, on shift, and make it cost nothing. We have the Chief avatar, and we have the Peer avatar.
So now let's start talking about actual monetary return on investment for health and wellness interventions, and I have three, I think three or four research papers that I'm just going to hit a couple points.
The first one, and I'll put these links in the show notes. The first one is by Manny Romero and Brent Alvar, two of my favorite firefighter researchers. And it's called the New Model for Optimizing Human Firefighter. I'm sorry, Optimizing Firefighter Human Performance. And it's a [00:23:00] great paper. It talks about all of the things that could be really useful for a fire department, physical therapy, on site athletic trainers, nutrition, mental health, all of these things. But the thing that was really interesting in the paper, there are existing firefighter health and wellness programs that have shown tremendous value to their respective fire departments and municipal governments.
However, the annual costs. Savings benefits for firefighter health and wellness programs have not been published in the scientific literature, so you're not going to be able to, and this was published in August, 2021, more than likely, you're still not going to be able to go do a lit research review and find actual numbers of: we saved 3 for every dollar that we spent. So that's the first piece of it.
The second piece of it is from a, an article, a research article that was conducted that was written from research done in [00:24:00] Tucson fire department evaluation of a fitness intervention for new firefighters, injury reduction and economic benefits.
What they did was they, the researchers designed the intervention to be used during the academy. And then peer trainers what is the word? Annette, what is the word? Peer trainers supervise the intervention. So while they were, while the candidates were in the academy, and while they were on probation, they basically had a peer fitness trainer supervisor.
And what they found was that it saved them about 33,000 in workers comp claims as compared to academy classes that didn't have these peer fitness trainer supervisors, and it cost them about 32,000 to do the program between paying the peer trainers off duty and whatever expenses. So they, it was a. It was a gain of 2.4%. Not huge. [00:25:00] Not, it's not a 2.4 to 1 return on investment. It's simply a savings of 2.4 percent by having some supervision. So that's interesting.
Then I talked briefly about how San Antonio Fire brought in an athletic trainer and they realized tremendous return on investments of between 6 and 10 to 1 with simply having an embedded athletic trainer, and then I talked about how previous podcast guests, Maura Shea was able to show a tremendous monetary return on investment by having an embedded athletic trainer in various Indiana fire departments. There is some data that says, okay, just giving these people some supervision saves us a percentage. There is some data that says having an athletic trainer gives us a [00:26:00] X to one return on investment.
And that's great. So now let's go outside the fire department. Let's go to Johnson and Johnson. And this is an article from 2011 recent experience in health promotion at Johnson and Johnson, lower health spending, strong return on investment. One of the things that I took from this article was this by our calculations, Johnson is delivering a positive ROI estimated at between 1.88 to 3.92 for every dollar spent. So somewhere between a little less than two, almost to four for every dollar they spent. But here's the kicker. This program has been going on for three decades!
So it's not a six month program that they trialed and found, Oh we didn't get any return, huge return on investment. So we're just going to. [00:27:00]
So the very last article I talked about was Return on Investment of Workplace Wellness Programs for Chronic Disease Prevention and Systematic Review. And within this, it showed that several studies provide evidence that workplace wellness programs can be cost effective, meaning they don't save money, but they improve health at a price that is considered a good value for the money.
Ah, there it is. Why in the fire service are we so concerned on these huge returns on investment when really, maybe we should be more concerned about is it cost effective and is it a good value? So shift your thinking a little bit from return on investment to cost effectiveness.
I spent some time with Joe [00:28:00] Listman, previous podcast guest, talking to him about maintenance and vehicles and why we take care of them the way that we do. And so we 18 months ago took possession of a brand new Pierce ladder truck, 1.4 million, which the Pierce mechanic was out there the day that I was out talking to Joe and he indicated that it was well over 2 million to replace that same rig now. Joe, being a great mechanic, makes sure that we do everything we possibly can to take care of this vehicle.
We invest a lot of this investment that's actually depreciating. So we do daily checks. Your department probably does this too. Daily checks. [00:29:00] There's weekly checks that are more comprehensive. There's monthly things that we do. Then there's preventive maintenance schedule when it actually goes out of service and it goes over to the maintenance shop.
They do oil changes and whatever, check the tires, rotate the summer air for the winter or whatever they're doing. And then there's also that catastrophic maintenance.
So this happened not too long ago. I'm an engine lieutenant. I should not be going to the hospital. I should certainly not be going to the hospital in the middle of the night, and I should certainly not go twice in one night, but that happened not too long ago.
So in our department, if there's a critical EMS call and they need extra hands, we simply take people off the engine, put them on the ambulance, and then usually the engine just chases them. I shouldn't say chase, follows them to the hospital, picks up personnel and goes back in service. So that happened twice in one night, not too long ago.[00:30:00]
And so after the second time, let me back up. The second time we were there, we actually ran into the squad who was also at the hospital because of a critical medical call. So we went back in service. We went back to bed, got up for a call, I don't know, 15 minutes later, we're driving to the call and my driver says, Whoa, that's the squad getting towed.
So they had broken down on the way back from the hospital and had to be towed. That's a catastrophe, right? That's a catastrophic failure of something. But here's the kicker. We're not going to look at our daily, weekly, monthly, and preventative maintenance and say, “This shit doesn't work. We're not going to do it anymore because the squad broke down anyway.”
But yet we do that with our humans. We institute a workout policy at a department somewhere, and someone [00:31:00] twists their ankle jumping rope, and all of a sudden, this wellness, fitness, this doesn't work. We're not doing it anymore.
I think we're thinking about it wrong. So I went into actually I, I started to break down some of the numbers and we won't dig into the numbers too deep because I can see I've already been talking for 30 minutes, but let's now talk about a human.
So I told you it costs 1.4 million to buy a ladder truck, and I told you why we take good care of it, because we want to get 10 good years out of it before we traded it. If you keep it too much longer, you're not going to get a good trade in value. So that's our program. We get the best years of its life, and then we trade it in, and there's, it still holds some value for a trade in.
So I went back in my payment records, my pay [00:32:00] stubs, if you will, and I did a little bit of forecasting honestly. But if you had to put a number value on me, a 19 and a half year veteran, my fire department has easily invested $2 million. So more than the price of a ladder truck. Easily $2 million. And arguably I'm irreplaceable because I'm a human.
And yes, you could put another human in my seat, but there's 19 and a half years of experience that just went poof. You can't get it back. So if I go out on a catastrophic injury, because I didn't know how to take care of myself, I wasn't maintaining myself. That's a huge loss. And so what is the maintenance schedule for a human, which is an appreciating investment, because [00:33:00] at some point you start to know enough that you're more valuable.
You are able to work independently. Without so much supervision. So in other words, at some point in my career, my officer was not going to send me around the back by myself. He was going to go with me. We were going to do that job together, but at some point in my career, the light bulb comes on and my officer says, this one understands what they're doing well enough that I can give them that task alone.
And then as I got better and better in my career, became an officer, I was able to train other people. So I, and every other firefighter, to some extent. is an appreciating investment. Now, at some point we get old, we get decrepit, we get crabby, and our value potentially starts to decline a little bit, but humans [00:34:00] are an appreciating investment.
What are we investing in their maintenance? And I would say at the majority of departments, there is no daily They may allow you to do physical fitness on duty, but you have to do it in your free time when nothing else is going on. Good luck. There's really nothing. There's no weekly maintenance, no monthly maintenance.
And by monthly, I would say maybe education. Preventative maintenance, maybe a lot of departments do medical physicals. And so that to me would be preventative maintenance. And then this, the the catastrophes, the catastrophic events, they are likely and they are costly.
Our personnel are our most valuable asset. Many departments say that, [00:35:00] but they don't follow through with what it takes to take care of those investments.
So here's a little plot twist. Does your department go on CO no illness calls? My department does, and if you've ever been on one of those calls, most of the time, it's a: my detector is chirping incident.
And if they would take down. The detector, and read the little chart on the back, they would see one beep every minute or a chirp is low battery, five beeps every minute, end of life, four beeps and a pause, actual emergency. But if your department is like most departments, you respond on these CO, no illness for a chirping monitor, you just, you respond on them and you have to think about what it costs to respond on them.
It's three salaries or four [00:36:00] salaries of the fire company, possibly two if you run two man engines. There's the fuel costs. There's the wear and tear. There's the risk of an accident while you're out on the road, and you can't quantify that. But just every time you go out on the road, there's a risk of the accident.
And then there's that factor of being unavailable. The 2-year-old next to the station is choking and it takes six additional minutes to get help because you're out on a chirping CO detector. And I actually put together some numbers of, how much it costs to respond to these incidents if they're say seven miles away.
And so on and so forth. And that is really not the point of it. The point is this. Why do we respond? Why do we respond to a chirping CO detector when no one is, no one has a headache, no one's throwing up? Why do we do that? Because it's the right thing to do. [00:37:00] Because the education has been, CO is a colorless, tasteless, odorless gas and it can kill you.
And so people are scared. And so when their CO detector goes off, they want to be reassured. We go, because it's the right thing to do.
So how about this? Someone stubs their toe at 2 in the morning and calls 911. That's an emergency. Someone has a sniffle and calls 911. That's an emergency. Someone can't sleep at 3 in the morning and calls 9 1 1. That's an emergency. Someone calls and says, I found my uncle. He's definitely dead. He's been dead for days. It's still an emergency. We still respond as if it's an emergency. And so there's a cost [00:38:00] associated with all of that too. Usually it's five or possibly more salaries because you're going to have an ambulance and a fire company, and sometimes a battalion chief or supervisor, EMS supervisor, depending upon the type of call, there's the fuel, there's the wear and tear, there's the risk of accident.
And again, there's that being unavailable. Why do we respond to those kinds of calls? At least in the state of Illinois, we have to. It's the law. We can't not respond. Even if that person has called 9 1 1 for the same nonsense a hundred times this year. We still have to respond because it's the law.
And so starting to tie this together, why are we so willing to invest money in the [00:39:00] depreciating investment of a fire rig? And why are we unwilling to invest money in the appreciating investment of a personnel?
We also have to consider that health and wellness services provide value beyond direct return on investment beyond, I spent a dollar and we made 2. They provide value for recruitment and retention, and I already told you, we have a problem with that in our state. We have a problem with recruitment and retention.
And so when young firefighters are comparing departments. And looking at money and looking at time off and looking at other benefits, if they see there is a health and wellness initiative here, where I get yearly [00:40:00] physicals, and we have a strength and conditioning coach that's here in the station 3 times a week, we have a dietician that we can meet with, and it doesn't cost me anything, you best believe that's something that's going to attract these young firefighters.
We also have to remember that there's a lot of mental and moral injury in the fire service, which yields injury to morale and having embedded mental health professionals can help bolster the workforce. They can make a mentally more sound workforce. I would argue just like the CO detector too. Is the right thing to do.
If we're going to do the right thing for our public without questioning it, why are we not willing to [00:41:00] do the right thing for our personnel without questioning it? And then finally, much like responding to the EMS calls, which is a law, we have to taking care of these men and women who take care of others.
In my opinion, it should be a law. And you can go back to things like, say, the Triangle Shirt Waste Fire of 1911, where women and children died because doors were blocked and locked. And that actually changed code so that an event like that wouldn't happen again.
We have a residential step height code in the building code. You can't make your steps two feet high. You're not allowed to. There's a reason for it. It's not safe. Building code requires GFI outlets near sinks in bathrooms [00:42:00] and kitchens. It requires that you cannot put grills on wooden decks. These are laws and codes that are made to help save people's lives.
Heck, seatbelts! Seatbelts is a law to help save people's lives. So why aren't we making laws? If no one's going to do it willingly, why aren't we making laws that says we have to?
I'm going to start winding down here, but here's the thing. The devil is in the details. And although some fire agencies do recognize the need for health and wellness interventions, they sometimes miss the mark with implementation due to their perceived lack of funding, lack of expertise, the whole DIY method, or lack of cultural support.
And recently I noted that the Buffalo [00:43:00] Police Department, I was on LinkedIn snooping around and someone had posted that the Buffalo Police Department had hired a full-time wellness coordinator, which is amazing. And so I looked, I dug a little bit deeper and I looked and they actually took an officer offline and made him the wellness coordinator, and this is from the article, Officer Matt Cross, who has been with the department for five years, will be taking over this role. He serves as the leader for the Buffalo Police peer support team, which consists of 21 volunteers.
I think this is fantastic, but this is my question. Why did they not hire a human performance specialist rather than filling the position with the police officer? Now, I admit, I do not know this individual's background. He very well may be a dietitian. He very well may be a strength and conditioning coach or a psychologist, [00:44:00] he may, but also revisit that whole, it's difficult to be a profit in your own kingdom thought.
So I reached back out on LinkedIn and I just said, I'm curious as to why this position was filled by a police officer, not a human performance specialist, like a strength coach, a dietitian, mental health professional, athletic trainer, or physical therapist. No one really had an answer for me, but in preparing for my talk, I did a little search of salaries.
I got this from salary. com and a police officer in Buffalo, it looks like they make around 58 to 66 K. Guys, I think you're underpaid! For 34 to 60 you could hire a strength and conditioning professional for 55 to 80 you could hire a dietitian. For 44 to 62 K you could hire an athletic trainer and you're going to have to be paying that second salary anyway, because officer cross when he went off the line, I'm sure they had to backfill his position on the line.
And so I guess my question is just, as long as you were [00:45:00] creating this great position, why would you not set yourself up for the best success by having an outside human performance specialist? And that was my question.
So how do we nudge the agency to do what it takes? So we already know that health and wellness interventions can be not only cost effective, but there can be a big return on investment, but even that information doesn't seem to be convincing them because they're just afraid we're going to spend this money and it's not going to work. So how do we nudge them to do what it takes?
And my, I guess my best, is this an analogy or a metaphor? I think I don't know what it is. I read this in a Brene Brown book where she was talking about her daughter who had a teacher with a marble jar. And so it was like a mason jar and when the kids were being quote, unquote, good and acting calm and cooperative in the classroom and working on their [00:46:00] homework and doing basically what they should be doing, the teacher put marbles in the jar and when they were causing/wreaking havoc and chaos, she was taking marbles out of the jar. But the whole idea was if they got the marble jar full, they would get to have a classroom pizza party.
So I would argue that we need to do the same thing. The teacher didn't make the kids demonstrate that they could be good before she bought the marble jar. She bought the marble jar knowing that it was going to work, believing that it was going to work. And if we can get our agencies to think a little bit more like this teacher and not try to grab this crazy return on investment or this big capture, this big, I don't know, weight loss or whatever they're trying to capture before they even invest in a program, they're going to be more successful.
They have to trust by the marble jar. Buy the program and then let it [00:47:00] do its thing.
Here's the thing. Usually I do a bottom line up front. This is a bottom line up last. Although a quality DIY program may provide value, it's not going to provide a huge return on investment and it's also probably not going to be hugely successful.
Is having a peer fitness trainer trying to do things on duty in free time, just doing their best with nothing better than nothing? It can be, but it can also be worse than nothing, especially if that peer fitness trainer really doesn't know what they're doing.
If we measure return on investment any way, it's going to be less when it's administered by a peer. Quality of the program. Actual monetary return on investment, it's just going to be less. [00:48:00]
The other thing that we have to remember is in the fire service, we do this thing where we identify a problem. We work very hard on the problem and then as soon as it looks like the problem is going away, we take our foot off the gas and we take our focus away from it and we look at something else. So we have to keep our foot on the gas, regardless of what we're doing, keep our foot on the gas, don't take it off.
And then just like Johnson and Johnsen, all of this stuff takes time. So even if you have hired an embedded professional you're doing it. Best practices. It's still going to take time. You're not going to see a huge monetary return on investment, probably in 3 weeks. In a year, you definitely might, but let's just stop talking about money for a second and let's just talk about providing value for our people and doing [00:49:00] things because it's the right freaking thing to do.
Alright, that my friends was a lot. That's a 50-minute solo episode. That's a lot of talking for AZ. Just a quick reminder in case you forwarded through the beginning, I am going to put a GoFundMe link for my guy Jeremiah in the show notes. I would certainly appreciate it if, any little thing that you can give, I would appreciate it.
And I think I need to I need to go to the gym because I didn't make it due to the dog rescue. But I think that's all and AZ is definitely out.
