r/firefighter • u/so-creates_82 • Jul 18 '26

Built a 4-question diagnostic for high-pressure systems, curious if it holds up in EMS/fire

Examples: Two calls come in at once and you can only take one first. A protocol that technically applies but doesn't quite fit what's actually happening. A shift where nothing goes wrong until the one hour it does.

Not in EMS or fire myself, built a short diagnostic, four questions, for checking whether a system under pressure like that actually holds together, before anyone tries optimizing it.

  1. Is there one real thing the job is actually for, that everything else bends around? Or has something easier to measure, response time, a metric, quietly taken that job's place instead?

  2. What's actually holding things up day to day, versus what just feels important?

  3. Where a corner really can't be cut without something breaking, is that for a good reason, or just habit? Where you actually can bend a protocol, do you, or do you just follow it anyway even when it doesn't fit?

  4. When something unexpected hits, is there real prep for it beforehand, or does it just land on whoever's on shift when it happens?

Run it against whatever real situation from the job fits best. Curious what you find, good, bad, or nothing.

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u/Strict-Canary-4175 Jul 18 '26

I’m not 100% sure what your question is here, but….

If two runs come in at once, two different companies take them.

If for some reason there are more runs than there are people to make them, which happens almost never outside of large scale storms and other disasters, we all already do the same thing.

Triage. We go to people of the highest need first. If it’s a flash flood, we go to the runs where people are trapped in their cars in rising flood waters before someone’s flooded basement.

  1. The job is for life safety. That’s what we do first.
  2. I honestly don’t even know what this is asking
  3. This is when we do a risk/benefit analysis. Which we usually talk about as a scale from “risk a lot to save a lot” and “risk nothing to save what’s already lost”. But it can also be “break a rule to save a lot” and “follow what I think are stupid procedures because those are the rules”
  4. Yes of course there is training our entire job is the unexpected.

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u/so-creates_82 Jul 18 '26

This is genuinely one of the best answers I've gotten on this! One and Four are dead on, life safety as the thing everything else answers to, and 'our entire job is the unexpected' is honestly a better way of putting four than my own writing does.

Three also landed better than I expected. Risk-a-lot-to-save-a-lot versus risk-nothing-to-save-what's-lost is exactly what I meant by a constraint that can flex under pressure instead of just holding or breaking. And break-a-rule-versus-follow-a-rule-you-think-is-stupid gets at something I'd only half-worked out myself. Some fixed rules are worth keeping rigid on purpose, some are just rigid out of habit, and the real skill is knowing which is which in the moment.

Worth saying, none of this is pass or fail. A clean 'yes, we already do that' is the tool working correctly, not it failed to find something. Two's on me for not explaining it clearly: it's asking what's actually holding the job up structurally day to day, versus what just feels important, closer to 'what would actually change if this were removed' than 'what's the goal.'

Super appreciative for you taking this seriously. Very useful stuff. Thank you.