One of the changes noted in Putnam's Bowling Alone that is seldom mentioned is that it is increasingly difficult to get people to volunteer for community activities. The 20-80 rule seems to have dipped down to 15-85.
Comedian Norm MacDonald did a joke once on SNL's fake news headline bit about how fire departments in Wisconsin (iirc) were having trouble finding enough volunteer firefighters. "Experts speculate," he said, "that the problem may have to do with the extreme danger combined with the complete absence of pay."
But in fact it didn't used to be hard to find people, because people were motivated by the honor shown to them by their communities. Even if you were just out shopping for groceries (or auto parts on a Saturday afternoon, as was often the case for dad when I was young), in that entirely out-of-context situation being recognized as a firefighter meant that dad would be treated with a great deal of respect. People would do a lot to be respected like that, once, and it was leveraged for the common good.
I don't know about other places, but in this part of Wisconsin the shortage of volunteer paramedics appears to be driven by the expectation that they'll have better training and equipment and be able to do everything in an ambulance that the big city guys can do--which costs a fair bit of time and money. At least so says the local (not Madison) newspaper.
In my mind, I always conflate Bowling Alone with this other book about a lesbian who pretended to be a man and joined a bowling league. They're actually quite different books, but might be usefully read together; the latter book really develops a sympathetic picture of men in America and their problems, which are often invisible (and certainly not subject to sympathy) in social science discourse.
james, that's an interesting thing. Given that paramedics require the same amount of training as RNs, it seems a prohibitively expensive thing to do just to volunteer. Are they talking about EMTs in general? Basic EMT can be done in a semester, part-time (though Grim may have something to say about how much time it actually takes these days - my information is old).
So, whose expectation is it? The counties or towns, or the people who might volunteer?
From the paper.. I'm not sure who "they" are who are increasing the education requirements.
There are all kinds of factors conspiring against departments’ hiring and retention efforts—both in Wisconsin and nationally. Those include low pay for volunteers, increasing training needs, the economic pressures of the pandemic and the inflation wave—and too many employers chasing too few workers.
“We have a hard time recruiting people,” said Russ Schafer, chief of the Lodi Area EMS agency.
Training: A double-edged sword
Schafer said increases with required training and certifications for volunteer workers have proven to be part of the staffing challenges.
“As they increase our education requirements, it gets harder for people to do it on a volunteer basis,” Schafer said. “It’s not really conducive to someone who want do it a couple times a month.”
Volunteer EMT certifications are required to take a semester-long, twice per week basic training course at an approved education center which include tech colleges around the state. They also to have pass a state test and maintain certification with additional and refresher training.
Most paid fire and EMS departments require associate’s or bachelor’s degrees and/or significant experience in the field.
Yeah, that makes sense. The volunteer EMT certification requirements look right if they expect people to be able to do the job, but at the same time, it could be hard for someone with a full time job and a family who is not getting paid to do it.
You can read the Wikipedia summary of Bowling Alone and get most of it. Americans belonged to lots of organisations in the 50s (Churches, scouts, bowling, Masons, bridge clubs) and now they don't. Harvard researcher examines why and the consequences. He writes well enough that it's a good read if you want to spend some time with the subject.
It’s a very intense semester to get a Basic EMT certification. Unfortunately our class seems to have foundered; course materials including textbooks were mistakenly shipped to another college with a similar name on the other side of the country, and the lead instructor got very ill. The testing schedule is very intense throughout the course, with an 80% average on the tests required to continue and an 80% final grade required to complete— which, in return, only makes you eligible to take the real certification test. As we lost weeks of instruction up front, we were too far behind to meet the testing schedule.
Well that sucks. I hope the instructor recovers quickly.
Back when I did it, it was only the equivalent of 6 credit hours plus clinicals in the ER and with an ambulance service, but I've heard they upped it to 8 and added AED training since then.
We did have to make the high test scores and pass the licensure exam after finishing the class. That hasn't changed.
Of course, each state has somewhat different requirements.
Thanks, AVI. I'll check it out on Wikipedia, but I may get the book as well. It's a topic I'm interested in. Won't be able to read it until summer, though.
Thinking more about EMT training, there's no reason it has to be this way. When I went through the paramedic program, it seemed almost designed to keep part-time students out. Basic EMT was one 6 credit hour course with 40 hours of clinicals in ERs and ambulances. (Here, it's now an 8 credit hour course, plus clinicals.) Then, you have to take the state licensure test after completing the class.
The next semester was worse: Advanced EMT was a single 9 credit hour class with a 1 credit hour co-requisite. If you couldn't spend 10 hours a week in class, forget it. Plus clinicals. I can't remember how many clinical hours were required, but ballpark 100? About a shift a week for about 2/3s of the semester. And another licensure test after the course work.
I don't know why it was designed that way, but it could be re-designed to make it more do-able part time. Break the Basic EMT course into two parts, do part 1 in one semester and part 2 in the next. Students would get the same amount of classroom hours and clinical hours, but it would be spread out over 8 months instead of packed into 4.
Similarly, Advanced EMT could be a 3-semester program instead of one semester.
Having one paramedic per unit (or even per shift if dispatch prioritizes calls) would be good for rural services because they tend to have much longer transport times, but it's a huge time investment to get that license. As I recall, EMT Paramedic took two more semesters of 15 credit hours each, plus 200+ hours of clinicals. And then a huge licensure exam after the courses were done.
It's even worse than that, Tom, because the regulations pertaining to these things forbid our volunteers from functioning as paramedics while acting as volunteers. We happen to have two paramedics on our station, as both of them are professional paramedics who also volunteer in the community in their spare time. They can't perform as paramedics when they're serving the VFD, though: the law requires that they not perform any services except those rated at the Basic EMT level while they are acting as members of our department, because the department itself is only rated to Basic EMT level.
Even if you get over the hump of getting people who are paramedic-qualified and certified, the government will still forbid volunteers from acting on those skills.
This prompts one of many occasions on which some of us have to ask ourselves if we'd rather obey the law, or save lives / put out fires. The obviously moral and correct choice is often actually forbidden by the government.
Our local VFD continues to putter along, perhaps because it's a small county that hasn't yet felt the full effects of rigorous bureaucratization. Texas is relaxed about lots of things, such as home-schooling. Volunteer firefighting is still something that can be done casually here a few times a month, in part because our structure fires are small and almost always fought from outside, while our wildfires are in brush rather than forest, and not too terribly difficult to fight without serious danger of entrapment. The volunteers don't care about being paid; they're motivated, as you say, by honor, service, camaraderie, and purpose. But they could easily be driven off by over-regulation.
I believe strongly in neighborhoods driven by volunteerism. They do a much better job repelling the natural tendency of busybodies to ruin everything. Small government units should strike to handle things without outside help in all but the most severe emergencies--otherwise they'll find that the help has unpleasant strings attached by the army of Karens that are always massing on the borders. The usual message should be a resolute "Thanks, we've got this. Go back to Austin."
All of this is credentialism driven by protectionist stances from the respective guilds, in the name of the public good, but in reality at our detriment.
18 comments:
One of the changes noted in Putnam's Bowling Alone that is seldom mentioned is that it is increasingly difficult to get people to volunteer for community activities. The 20-80 rule seems to have dipped down to 15-85.
Comedian Norm MacDonald did a joke once on SNL's fake news headline bit about how fire departments in Wisconsin (iirc) were having trouble finding enough volunteer firefighters. "Experts speculate," he said, "that the problem may have to do with the extreme danger combined with the complete absence of pay."
But in fact it didn't used to be hard to find people, because people were motivated by the honor shown to them by their communities. Even if you were just out shopping for groceries (or auto parts on a Saturday afternoon, as was often the case for dad when I was young), in that entirely out-of-context situation being recognized as a firefighter meant that dad would be treated with a great deal of respect. People would do a lot to be respected like that, once, and it was leveraged for the common good.
What do you two think has caused the decrease in volunteering?
Is Bowling Alone a good book? I've heard of it, but never looked at it.
I don't know about other places, but in this part of Wisconsin the shortage of volunteer paramedics appears to be driven by the expectation that they'll have better training and equipment and be able to do everything in an ambulance that the big city guys can do--which costs a fair bit of time and money. At least so says the local (not Madison) newspaper.
In my mind, I always conflate Bowling Alone with this other book about a lesbian who pretended to be a man and joined a bowling league. They're actually quite different books, but might be usefully read together; the latter book really develops a sympathetic picture of men in America and their problems, which are often invisible (and certainly not subject to sympathy) in social science discourse.
james, that's an interesting thing. Given that paramedics require the same amount of training as RNs, it seems a prohibitively expensive thing to do just to volunteer. Are they talking about EMTs in general? Basic EMT can be done in a semester, part-time (though Grim may have something to say about how much time it actually takes these days - my information is old).
So, whose expectation is it? The counties or towns, or the people who might volunteer?
From the paper.. I'm not sure who "they" are who are increasing the education requirements.
There are all kinds of factors conspiring against departments’ hiring and retention efforts—both in Wisconsin and nationally. Those include low pay for volunteers, increasing training needs, the economic pressures of the pandemic and the inflation wave—and too many employers chasing too few workers.
“We have a hard time recruiting people,” said Russ Schafer, chief of the Lodi Area EMS agency.
Training: A double-edged sword
Schafer said increases with required training and certifications for volunteer workers have proven to be part of the staffing challenges.
“As they increase our education requirements, it gets harder for people to do it on a volunteer basis,” Schafer said. “It’s not really conducive to someone who want do it a couple times a month.”
Volunteer EMT certifications are required to take a semester-long, twice per week basic training course at an approved education center which include tech colleges around the state. They also to have pass a state test and maintain certification with additional and refresher training.
Most paid fire and EMS departments require associate’s or bachelor’s degrees and/or significant experience in the field.
Yeah, that makes sense. The volunteer EMT certification requirements look right if they expect people to be able to do the job, but at the same time, it could be hard for someone with a full time job and a family who is not getting paid to do it.
You can read the Wikipedia summary of Bowling Alone and get most of it. Americans belonged to lots of organisations in the 50s (Churches, scouts, bowling, Masons, bridge clubs) and now they don't. Harvard researcher examines why and the consequences. He writes well enough that it's a good read if you want to spend some time with the subject.
It’s a very intense semester to get a Basic EMT certification. Unfortunately our class seems to have foundered; course materials including textbooks were mistakenly shipped to another college with a similar name on the other side of the country, and the lead instructor got very ill. The testing schedule is very intense throughout the course, with an 80% average on the tests required to continue and an 80% final grade required to complete— which, in return, only makes you eligible to take the real certification test. As we lost weeks of instruction up front, we were too far behind to meet the testing schedule.
There’s always next semester, of course.
Well that sucks. I hope the instructor recovers quickly.
Back when I did it, it was only the equivalent of 6 credit hours plus clinicals in the ER and with an ambulance service, but I've heard they upped it to 8 and added AED training since then.
We did have to make the high test scores and pass the licensure exam after finishing the class. That hasn't changed.
Of course, each state has somewhat different requirements.
Thanks, AVI. I'll check it out on Wikipedia, but I may get the book as well. It's a topic I'm interested in. Won't be able to read it until summer, though.
Thinking more about EMT training, there's no reason it has to be this way. When I went through the paramedic program, it seemed almost designed to keep part-time students out. Basic EMT was one 6 credit hour course with 40 hours of clinicals in ERs and ambulances. (Here, it's now an 8 credit hour course, plus clinicals.) Then, you have to take the state licensure test after completing the class.
The next semester was worse: Advanced EMT was a single 9 credit hour class with a 1 credit hour co-requisite. If you couldn't spend 10 hours a week in class, forget it. Plus clinicals. I can't remember how many clinical hours were required, but ballpark 100? About a shift a week for about 2/3s of the semester. And another licensure test after the course work.
I don't know why it was designed that way, but it could be re-designed to make it more do-able part time. Break the Basic EMT course into two parts, do part 1 in one semester and part 2 in the next. Students would get the same amount of classroom hours and clinical hours, but it would be spread out over 8 months instead of packed into 4.
Similarly, Advanced EMT could be a 3-semester program instead of one semester.
Having one paramedic per unit (or even per shift if dispatch prioritizes calls) would be good for rural services because they tend to have much longer transport times, but it's a huge time investment to get that license. As I recall, EMT Paramedic took two more semesters of 15 credit hours each, plus 200+ hours of clinicals. And then a huge licensure exam after the courses were done.
It's even worse than that, Tom, because the regulations pertaining to these things forbid our volunteers from functioning as paramedics while acting as volunteers. We happen to have two paramedics on our station, as both of them are professional paramedics who also volunteer in the community in their spare time. They can't perform as paramedics when they're serving the VFD, though: the law requires that they not perform any services except those rated at the Basic EMT level while they are acting as members of our department, because the department itself is only rated to Basic EMT level.
Even if you get over the hump of getting people who are paramedic-qualified and certified, the government will still forbid volunteers from acting on those skills.
This prompts one of many occasions on which some of us have to ask ourselves if we'd rather obey the law, or save lives / put out fires. The obviously moral and correct choice is often actually forbidden by the government.
Yikes. That does suck. I imagine it's a huge hurdle to get the department a more advanced rating.
Our local VFD continues to putter along, perhaps because it's a small county that hasn't yet felt the full effects of rigorous bureaucratization. Texas is relaxed about lots of things, such as home-schooling. Volunteer firefighting is still something that can be done casually here a few times a month, in part because our structure fires are small and almost always fought from outside, while our wildfires are in brush rather than forest, and not too terribly difficult to fight without serious danger of entrapment. The volunteers don't care about being paid; they're motivated, as you say, by honor, service, camaraderie, and purpose. But they could easily be driven off by over-regulation.
I believe strongly in neighborhoods driven by volunteerism. They do a much better job repelling the natural tendency of busybodies to ruin everything. Small government units should strike to handle things without outside help in all but the most severe emergencies--otherwise they'll find that the help has unpleasant strings attached by the army of Karens that are always massing on the borders. The usual message should be a resolute "Thanks, we've got this. Go back to Austin."
All of this is credentialism driven by protectionist stances from the respective guilds, in the name of the public good, but in reality at our detriment.
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