The Bottom Line: Fire Prevention and Public Health Partnerships

By Andrea C. Gielen, Sc.D., Sc.M.
November 2005

You may think public health is about ensuring sanitary restaurants and investigating disease outbreaks – certainly important functions of public health, no doubt! But public health is also about preventing injuries and their debilitating consequences. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the lead public health agency in this country, has an entire Center devoted to injury and violence prevention (the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control) . Fire safety is one of their goals and partnerships with the fire service are an essential element.

In this brief article, I will share information about two initiatives being conducted at the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy , with partial funding from the CDC, to illustrate the benefits of fire prevention and public health partnerships.

The Johns Hopkins CARES Mobile Safety Center. CARES stands for Children ARE Safe and that is our mission – to promote the safety of children and families by delivering fun, interactive education and affordable safety products. The mobile safety center is an innovative dissemination strategy for child safety products that involves a partnership with the Baltimore City Fire Department (BCFD), Maryland Science Center, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Johns Hopkins. The CARES mobile safety center is a 40 foot tractor trailer, designed as a house-on-wheels, with room-by-room interactive exhibits to show injury hazards and how to prevent them. An on-board smoke generator and door heating elements simulate the conditions inside a home during a fire. Public fire educators and a public health education specialist use the facility to teach visitors about safety products and how to protect their children. Safety products, such as smoke alarms, cabinet locks, and car seats are available on the van for sale at below-retail costs. The van travels to health clinics, community events, health fairs, and schools throughout Baltimore City, and in its first year of operation has reached more than four thousand children and adults. Read how the CARES partnership grew.

Promoting Smoke Alarm Use in Communities. Our team recently completed a literature review of community fire prevention studies, which was an update to two prior reviews , , A particular interest was to examine fire prevention activities that involved a partnership with the fire departments. We found several examples in which partnerships with fire departments resulted in successful programs, including those that demonstrated reduction in fires and deaths, increases in the number of working smoke alarms in communities, and improvements in children’s fire safety knowledge. Fire service personnel in these studies worked with community members to deliver their fire safety programs, they participated in canvassing and installation efforts, and they delivered school and community educational programs. We believe that the success of these partnership programs may be attributable in part to the special authority that fire service personnel have in communities. Their communication with the public can be particularly effective because they are perceived to have special expertise and a legitimate role in telling the public what they need to do. Also, when the fire service partners with others in their community they are seen as an “insider”, a member of the community, which further enhances their credibility.

Effective Partnerships and Their Benefits. Some of the lessons we have learned about effective partnerships include the importance of developing a shared vision as well as both short and long term objectives, respect for different traditions and operational imperatives, and clear and open communication. A shared vision is essential and is the basis for any partnership being established. Short term objectives foster a sense of accomplishment, which keeps people “coming to the table”. Understanding what is required for public health professionals and fire service personnel in their respective work environments facilitates smooth progress. The best way to foster that understanding is through clear and open communication.

There are many benefits of fire safety and public health partnerships. Members of the fire service have a special stature in the community, rightly commanding attention and respect for their life-saving work. When we partner with them, our public health messages can carry greater weight. Public health professionals have training in designing and evaluating community programs that promote health (including injury prevention!). When we partner, public education fire safety programs may be able to better document their successes. In fact, we have received CDC-funded grants to evaluate the process and impact of the mobile safety center described above. Conducting this research with the fire department helps to ensure that the lessons learned will be helpful to both fire safety and public health programs in the future.

Partnerships are important because they bring additional resources to the table –financial and human, as well as technical and creative expertise. In this time of very limited financial resources for prevention, collaboration becomes even more critical. The bottom line is that partnerships build better programs. We can reach more people, more efficiently, and more effectively when we work together.

About the author: Andrea C. Gielen, Sc.D., Sc.M., is Professor and Director at the Center for Injury Research and Policy, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health