Musculoskeletal injuries account for almost half of all injuries among the one million firefighters in this country. These injuries result in excessive absenteeism, costly medical claims, and disability. The handful of studies conducted on musculoskeletal injuries in the fire service have examined job tasks in relation to the physical requirements (i.e., aerobic capacity, flexibility, and strength) needed to perform fire suppression tasks. In actuality, today's firefighter is increasingly crosstrained as a firefighter and paramedic or emergency medical technician (termed firefighter/paramedic in this study). Such crosstraining is effective because these days a fire department can easily find that over 50% of its runs are for emergency medical services rather than for fire suppression. There is a need to examine the firefighter/paramedic job from an orgonomic perspective and describe the biomechanical stressors inherent int he job. These stressors include lifting heavy objects, twisting, stretching, and reaching. The proposed study will identify the physically strenuous job tasks of firefighter/paramedics with particular emphasis on the less studied rescue and emergency medical service aspects of the job. The study will quantify via task analyses the static and dynamic trunk motion parameters and workplace parameters relevant ot the identified tasks. Particular attention will be paid to those tasks that contribute to back injuries. The study population is 712 firefighter/paramedics from 17 suburban fire departments. The content domain of frequently performed physically strenuous tasks will be identified in two stages. An initial list of tasks will be identified through structured interviews with a random sample of 50 firefighter/paramedics. Then, a list of the top 20 tasks identified in the interviews will be validated through a survey mailed to a random sample of 256 firefighter/paramedics. The top 10 frequently performed tasks identified in the survey will then be stimulated. Each task will be performed by 10 individual firefighter/paramedics who volunteer to participate. Video data will be used to determine gross postures and movement ranges. More detailed kinematic data will be obtained for the torso using the Lumbar Motion Monitor. Task analyses will be performed in two stages. The first stage will focus on task decomposition. The second stage will describe the tasks from a biomechanical perspective focusing on the postures, their duration, the range of motion, and the forces exerted for each body part. The study will conclude by generating hypotheses to reduce musculoskeletal stressors in the identified tasks. These hypotheses will encompass methods of task accomplishment and equipment design, the validity of which can be determined in subsequent laboratory studies. This study is the ergonomic component of a program of research leading to the development of a series of integrated preventive interventions to reduce the severity and frequency of musculoskeletal injuries in the fire service.
