Captain Willie Wines Jr. (IronFiremen.com) has posted an interesting two posts on a call he ran recently. The type of call could happen anywhere to any of us. The post is here titled “Ramblings”.
Who the call was for didn’t really matter either. Who made the call does.
In this case, there is a young child who is not living in the best conditions.
After the Captain ran the call and wrote the post “Ramblings”, he followed up with another post titled “Update..”. In the second post he talks about calling in an order for a pizza for the child just so he knew that the child would have a meal that evening.
That is completely unnecessary in our job and on our wages, but it is compassionate and acceptable.
Compassion is not easy to come by in our jobs. Some are able to meld compassion in with our day to day jobs, but we all know that we can perform our jobs without compassion. We get the job done, it just doesn’t come across as well when we add compassion.
Compassion in the fire service is learned. Officers and veteran firefighters need to teach compassion to our new firefighters.
Does that mean we buy everyone pizzas? No, but it means we have to care.
Take a look over at IronFiremen.com and read about the call and then check out the comments. What do you think about some of the comments?
Link to the story “Ramblings” – Read the Comments
Link to the “Update”
Do you think we need to be compassionate?
I will tell you this, compassion will get you a lot farther than discarding the need for it. Our patients, victims, and their families and friends can tell when we are compassionate or not.
Compassion is nothing less than an absolute necessity in this line of work. Our only function is to serve the people. Of course we focus on the aspect of fighting fires, providing EMS and performing rescues. But at any given time on any given call we know that we are readily willing to do whatever it takes to assist the citizens that we serve. For instance in the morning after shift change our crew is going to assist the lady across the street from the station remove an old water heater from her basement, just to be helpful. Another example of compassion is leaving cookie dough in the freezer of the station when you go on vacation so that your crew can have cookies…thanks Rhett!
Don’t you mean Fire and/or EMS and/or HazMat and/or Technical Rescue and/or Emergency Management service? Or can we just go back to calling it the Fire Service?