An interview with Amy Childs, Assistant Risk Manager, Alachua County
Alachua County is located in north central Florida. Alachua County Fire Rescue (ACFR) is a career fire department serving approximately 284,000 residents over 962 square miles with a team of 364 personnel, including 330 uniformed members. The department operates from 17 stations and responded to 49,744 calls for service in 2023.
When Amy Childs joined Alachua County as health and wellness coordinator 10 years ago, she found that managing firefighters’ annual assessments was a labor-intensive, time-consuming process.
“We had 225 firefighters at the time, which meant capturing 225 separate data sets for blood pressure, weight, cardiovascular fitness, and other metrics,” she said. “It was a lot of information to handle, and like most people then, we used Excel. We couldn’t do much with the data without a lot of manual input and using formulas, and if anyone wanted to see their information, we had to provide it for them. We were on a path to grow to 364 people and knew that continuing in this way was unsustainable.”
The county received a grant and decided to invest in technology that would centralize data from eight different assessments in one central platform, visualize scores for each individual firefighter, and provide normalized scores by job role, age, gender, and other categories.
“We needed to find a platform with a proven track record of managing fitness assessments for firefighters and would allow us to make sense of that information,” Amy said. “It also had to be easy to use. FITSTATS was the only system that met these requirements.”
During the implementation, Amy worked closely with the FITSTATS team to match the platform’s broad feature range to ACFR’s specific needs. “The collaboration with FITSTATS was helpful from the start,” she said. “They were familiar with body weight and composition metrics, and flexibility and cardiovascular assessments. For firefighter-specific testing, we told them what we needed, and they customized the system for us. Since then, I’ve been able to go in and add more norms, demographics, and other things myself, which is useful.”
The main firefighter-specific test used by Alachua County Fire Rescue is the FPAT (Fireground Physical Ability Test). This simulates engine and ladder tasks that firefighters have to perform and assesses their abilities as occupational athletes more effectively than the CPAT (Candidate Physical Ability Test). ACFR used real data from its firefighters to come up with a realistic cutoff time and also tailored score ranges in its other wellness assessments to specific groups.
“We added the FPAT scores as one of our fitness norms with a pass or fail in FITSTATS, and it’s very relatable to our incumbent firefighters,” Amy said. “That’s an important measurement of their readiness and preparedness for us. Cardiovascular fitness, flexibility, and body composition are very demographic-specific, so we found standardized norms. These let us know if the scores displayed for each firefighter are considered healthy for them and allows us to compare them to others at a similar career stage.”
Previously, inputting firefighter assessment data into Excel was a headache. Making use of this information in reports to senior leadership was another significant challenge.
“When it came to creating executive summaries or aggregate reporting before using FITSTATS, I had to take each layer of the assessment, create my own tables and charts, and then restratify that,” Amy said. “It was a lot of manual entry and processing to get information and then create anything meaningful from that data.”
Now, Amy uses the convenient reporting features in FITSTATS to create executive summaries. These provide the fire chief and county leaders with an at-a-glance view of firefighters’ assessment scores via graphs, charts, and other kinds of visualization.
“When the wellness and fitness team evaluate the firefighter program with our leadership, we need to show how policy, programming, and assessment work together,” Amy said. “The only way to articulate that to decision makers is to put it in a format that tells that story and gives them the information they need. That’s what FITSTATS does. Having all the data organized in one place and being able to create reports without manual effort makes my job easier.”
When presenting reports, Amy is able to not only display a high-level overview of firefighters’ assessment scores, but also dive deeper into role-based data that provides valuable insights.
“Without data, you’re just guessing or making assumptions about whether firefighters are or aren’t fit enough,” she said. “With FITSTATS, we can show the areas where they’re doing well and those that they can improve in. We can also see what’s been effective from year to year, so we’re not just throwing programs out there and hoping that they work. Managing the data in FITSTATS makes it easier to do something useful with the assessment data we’re collecting.”
At Alachua County, annual assessments aren’t just a box check for ACFR or a collection of numbers. Instead, they are a significant indicator of operational readiness and a component of a long-running program that emphasizes firefighters’ overall wellbeing.
“One of the big pushes with our wellness initiative was to change the culture and emphasize a holistic view of health and fitness,” Amy said. “This would help firefighters prevent injury, work a full career, and enjoy retirement once they reach it. Managing assessments in FITSTATS shows them where they are today, how that compares to their past performance and others in their demographic, and which areas they can improve in.”
To create this culture shift, ACFR needed to get firefighters to understand why fitness, health, and wellness were so significant. To do so, they needed to buy into the assessment program and take their physical and mental wellbeing seriously. Previously, a lack of consistency was a problem, as initiatives came and went.
“FITSTATS helped provide consistency, which improved firefighter buy-in,” Amy said. “Veteran firefighters understand that the FPAT and our other assessments are a yearly requirement and for those who are earlier in their careers, it’s all they know. Putting resources toward a system that tracks firefighters’ information and is customized for them gives the whole wellness program credibility.”
While Amy and her colleagues sometimes drill down into assessment scores to find trends and specific details, firefighters just need a simple overview of their year-on-year performance. “Firefighting isn’t a job you do in front of a computer, so most of them need something that’s pretty straightforward and easy to use,” Amy said. “FITSTATS gives them immediate access to their assessment data so they can see where they’re at, and it provides a career-long view of their performance.”
When she first started working for Alachua County, Amy was the wellness coordinator for the fire department and other personnel. Since her role has switched to risk management, she has seen how the two perspectives are connected.
“From a risk perspective, it gives us another layer to our story about why it’s important to invest in health initiatives,” Amy said. “They have an impact on the wellbeing of the employee as a whole. The data in FITSTATS helps me make the case that firefighter fitness and wellness improves safety, prevents injuries, and reduces workers’ comp claims. It also allows us to identify people who aren’t meeting the cutoffs and provide resources that help them get up to the standards we expect.”
Firefighters’ unique job requirements challenge their wellness in many ways, from shift work disrupting their sleep patterns and eating habits to trauma impacting their mental health to work commitments leaving them too tired to train. Amy feels that providing them with an objective evaluation of their fitness and health is beneficial.
“The assessments we manage in FITSTATS provide a baseline to work from,” she said. “For some, it probably provided a wake-up call that they weren’t as fit as they thought, whereas for many of our veteran firefighters, it encouraged them that they were staying in shape. It encourages year-round fitness because people know they can’t just start training two weeks before the tests. The FITSTATS data has also created healthy competition because every firefighter wants to have the best scores.”
In closing, Amy explained why she recommends FITSTATS: “Working with multiple fire departments has given the FITSTATS team expertise that is hard to find,” she said. “A lot of people try to build their own solution for managing fitness and wellness data, but that takes time and resources and might not give them what they want. Whereas FITSTATS can be customized to meet those needs. The company’s experience with different assessments makes the system helpful and cost-effective.”
