I READ with interest your report on the funding gap facing the Scottish Fire and RescueService ("Firefighter jobs to be cut to meet fund gap", The Herald, May 28).
This comes as no great surprise. The as yet unannounced inevitable closing of fire stations in certain areas throughout Scotland, which will probably occur after the Scottish elections in 2016, should not come as a great surprise to anyone either.
Potential budget cuts for the fire service are regrettable as is the fact that neither the Scottish Government nor the Scottish Fire Service seem to be able to advocate any significant major additional role, beyond their traditional firefighting one, for the fire service.
Fire service personnel have had huge success in drastically reducing the number of fire fatalities/injuries and the frequency of all fire incidents in Scotland over the last few years. The proven professionalism exhibited by an efficient workforce which has achieved much success has, in some ways, also proved detrimental to that same workforce. Success in reducing fatalities and injuries combined with an overall reduction in incidences of fire has had the knock-on effect that the fire service is now not as busy operationally as it once was and thus has opened up a successful, efficent organisation to the apparent inevitability of job losses and possible fire station closures.
Rather than rewarding professionalism and expertise with the threat of job losses perhaps consideration should be given to expanding the role of the fire service into non-traditional areas, thus retaining jobs and, more importantly, increasing the level of beneficial service delivery for the safety of the Scottish population.
Proposals are being discussed to enable fire fighters to act as "first responders" to certain incidents. This essentially means that firefighters could potentially respond to and treat heart attack victims using defibrillators carried on fire appliances. It shouldn't take too much thought to consider that this limited measure alone, utilising a proven professional workforce located in existing strategic locations throughout Scotland and used to dealing with emergency situations of all types must, if implemented, not only provide a much improved level of service/safety for the Scottish public but also offer significant assistance to another professional but very hard-pressed body, the Scottish Ambulance Service.
Chief Fire Officer Alisdair Hay states in your article that he intends to meet some of the funding gap by, amongst other things, "partnership working". His proposals for such partnership working are welcome and in this regard I suggest that rather than have an efficient work force penalised with job cuts for their success the way forward would be for the role of the now under-utilised fire service to be significantly enhanced and expanded into areas such as "first responder" with the eventual aim, following adequate consideration and training, of the creation of a new combined fully integrated role between the fire and ambulance services in Scotland.
John S Milligan,
86 Irvine Road, Kilmarnock.
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