Applying the Social Vulnerability Index as a Leading Indicator to Protect Fire-Based Emergency Medical Service Responders’ Health

Abstract

During emergencies, areas with higher social vulnerability experience an increased risk for negative health outcomes. However, research has not extrapolated this concept to understand how the workers who respond to these areas may be affected. Researchers from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) merged approximately 160,000 emergency response calls received from three fire departments during the COVID-19 pandemic with the CDC’s publicly available Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) to examine the utility of SVI as a leading indicator of occupational health and safety risks. Multiple regressions, binomial logit models, and relative weights analyses were used to answer the research questions. Researchers found that higher social vulnerability on household composition, minority/language, and housing/transportation increase the risk of first responders’ exposure to SARS-CoV-2. Higher socioeconomic, household, and minority vulnerability were significantly associated with response calls that required emergency treatment and transport in comparison to fire-related or other calls that are also managed by fire departments. These results have implications for more strategic emergency response planning during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as improving Total Worker Health® and future of work initiatives at the worker and workplace levels within the fire service industry.

What Makes Urban Communities More Resilient to COVID-19? A Systematic Review of Current Evidence

“…Robustness as an outcome-oriented characteristic aims to enhance the strength of social resilience itself to withstand disaster impacts. For example, using culture and customs to enhance cohesion and organizational strength can improve the robustness of the community [ 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 ]; improving social health care coverage will improve social robustness [ 54 , 55 ]; and adaptive transformation of social capital helps to counteract the persistence of COVID-19 [ 56 , 57 ].…”

Promising Occupational Safety, Health, and Well-Being Approaches to Explore the Future of Work in the USA: An Editorial

“…Haas et al [13] advocate for more strategic planning after examining emergency response calls from fire departments during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors find higher social vulnerability based on household composition, minority/language, and housing/transportation increase the risk of first responders' exposure to SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), and are significantly associated with response calls that require emergency treatment and transport.…”