Physical and Cognitive Readiness

Fatigue Management

Did you know that the amount and quality of sleep you receive impacts how well you can perform? Your performance while you are sleep deprived can be as poor as when you are intoxicated! And, like when you are intoxicated, you may not recognize your own impairment.

As first responders, many aspects of fatigue management are beyond your control. When the bell tips, you are onto the next call even when your body is craving sleep. Many mainstream recommendations do not fit into your operational environment.

However, there ARE pieces that are within your control: ways to optimize your environment, ways to support your teammates, and ways to mitigate some of the negative performance implications of being tired.

When you are on the fireground, you do your best to eliminate or lessen all physical, safety, and exposure risks to your health. You need to recognize that health and performance risk doesn’t stop once you’ve left the scene.

Training for Responders and Families

One crucial step towards managing fatigue is understanding WHY it is so important. We provide outreach training for first responders, their departments, and/or their families, with an emphasis on the following topics:

• Health impacts of fatigue
• Cognitive impacts of fatigue
• Performance impacts of fatigue
• Fatigue mitigation strategies situated within a unique work environment

We want to lay a foundation of healthy practices that will serve you both during your career and well after your retirement.

Our goal is to improve awareness and generate buy-in (at both individual operator and leadership levels) for the implementation of data-driven programs that can improve the sleep, health, readiness, and performance of first responders on your team.

Sleep and Fatigue Monitoring

At Halligan Readiness, we believe that the first step to making a change is understanding where you are RIGHT NOW. That way, we can use data to empirically test any changes that are made to ensure that they are actually providing you with a benefit. We design a study specifically tailored to your department and your department’s needs, to evaluate factors such as sleep, fatigue, mood, performance, and critical lifestyle behaviors (such as exercise and nutrition). We employ a mix of survey measures and wearable sleep trackers to get a pulse on your current operations.

Shift Scheduling

Sometimes, minor tweaks to an individual’s sleep schedule can yield major performance gains. We use advanced modeling techniques to help you understand the performance potential of your team, and offer actionable guidance for how you can make it better.

Injury Prevention

Understanding Injury Causes

Every department serves a unique demographic with unique geophysical constraints. Accordingly, different departments place different physical demands on their first responders. In elderly or underserved communities, patient carries may be more prevalent; communities near the coast may experience a higher volume of water rescue calls; rural communities with less infrastructure may require first responders to carry heavy equipment farther distances. These differing demands are likely to lead to different causes of physical injury.

Understanding the leading causes of injury in YOUR department can help you enact preventative measures that will decrease the number of injured members out of work and ensure the long-term health of your members. This can result in substantial department savings in areas such as overtime salaries (to replace the injured member), acute (e.g., ER visits, medical imaging) and long-term (e.g., physical therapy) medical care, and insurance premiums.

We utilize the internal data that your department collects on prior and current injuries, in combination with federal databases such as NEMSIS, to provide you with an understanding of how and why injuries occur, and we provide actionable guidance for overcoming some of the leading injury causes.

Customized Research Design

Do you have specific questions that your department needs to have answered? Please reach out, and we will work together to design a research study that addresses your needs.

We specialize in both smaller-scale analyses utilizing data you already have in-house (see our Data Management page for more information) and in larger-scale research design. This may include things like developing surveys that can be deployed to your members or community, or empirical testing of new policy actions or commercial-off-the-shelf devices.

Let us know what you need, and we will figure out the rest.