BEHAVIORAL HEALTH
As fire fighters progress through their careers, they respond to countless emergencies. The vast majority of these involve solving the problem at hand and moving on to the next one.
Occasionally, however, a call can stay in the mind. The toll of seeing the horrors that come with responding to fires, medical emergencies, motor vehicle accidents, active shooter incidents, and more compounds over time. This sometimes leads fire fighters down a path to addiction, post-traumatic stress, and even worse... suicide.
The fire service has made great strides addressing behavioral health issues. Fire fighter peer support teams are now available to deploy after critical incidents. And every day, more awareness and training is being provided to give support for fire fighters in the field.
But the challenge remains and the workload continues to grow. The NEP Fire Fighter Foundation will be assisting fire service organizations looking to strengthen their peer support and behavioral health programs through the following services:
DONATION OF WEBSITES
As a tech company, NEP is able to donate websites to peer support teams in the field. These websites can contain contact information for the team, tips to curb behavioral health issues and any other resources a team feels it needs to provide to its fire fighters.
Also included in the website package is NEP’s internal management software- NEP Connect. This allows a team to strengthen communications with its members and provide for smoother operations when they are required to deploy to critical incidents.
TRAINING SCHOLARSHIPS
The NEP Fire Fighter Foundation can sponsor specialized peer support training for those fire service organizations that want to develop their own peer support team but do not have the funds to do so. The Foundation will work with already established reputable organizations to provide the needed training.