Are your personnel fit enough to perform their essential duties?
Once you’ve performed your departmental medical evaluations to ensure your personnel are medically cleared for duty, how do you know if your personnel are fit to perform their essential duties? Consider a Work Performance Evaluation (WPE).
What is a WPE?
A WPE is a series of job-specific activities that represent the critical essential functions that your incumbent firefighters are expected to perform on the fireground.
Why should a department implement a WPE?
A WPE can help identify individuals with a fitness capacity that is too low to perform their job. By instituting a WPE, these individuals can be flagged for case management and fitness rehabilitation. A firefighter with subpar fitness levels can be a liability to themselves, to other firefighters, and to the general public when on the fireground.
How will a WPE actually improve wellness and fitness in the department?
A WPE can help provide external motivation to those with low fitness levels. Also, a fire department can prevent at-risk firefighters from experiencing severe and potentially career-ending injuries.
The Process
The Department establishes its own minimum performance standards that protect the safety of the firefighter and provide the appropriate delivery of fire suppression and rescue services to the community.
Most departments have their personnel perform a WPE annually to ensure they are meeting the standard. WPE’s are also used to evaluate a firefighter who is returning to duty after an extended illness or injury.
The WPE consists of a sequence of events that requires the incumbent firefighter to progress along a pre-determined path from event to event in a continuous manner. The events are placed in a sequence that best simulates their use in a fire scene.
Depending on your needs, Public Safety Medical can:
- Build the WPE program from the ground up;
- Re-validate an existing WPE program or;
- Transport a WPE program from one fire department to another
The Investment for the WPE will vary depending upon your process. Please contact our Special Services department by calling 317.972.1180 or click here to send an e-mail.
