In 2020, there were approximately 676,900 volunteer firefighters in the US, and 95% of those serve communities smaller than 25,000 people and half of those serve communities less than 2,500. Wisconsin has over 20,000 volunteer firefighters serving 769 fire departments. The Rural Firefighters Delivering Agriculture Safety and Health (RF-DASH) program is a training program designed to motivate and prepare rural firefighters to respond to farms and ranches in their area, mitigate likely agents of injury and/or property loss on those operations, and prepare families and coworkers as first responders.
Since 2016, the program has formally trained 103 trainers in 11 US states and 5 provinces with widespread impact. For example, 23 Wisconsin-based trainees have trained 438 other emergency professionals and/or farmers. From this, we estimate that the 103 fire/EMS trainers have reached between ~2,000 first responders in the year following their training: ~1500 fire/EMS personnel; ~200 educators and students; ~150 community members; and ~100 farmers. The extensive reach of RF-DASH is due to the train-the-trainer model, by which trainees disseminate trainees to others with the continued support of the staff at NFMC.
Through CTSA support, RF-DASH has doubled the program size, reaching 633 to 1,131 new individuals in the state of Wisconsin, most of whom will be rural firefighters, and is well-positioned to reach 10% of the state’s volunteer firefighters.
This is just one example of the NIH CTSA grant award’s impact on the state of Wisconsin, through the University of Wisconsin Institute of Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR). Other examples include:
- Game-changing help for fungal disease. Rural Wisconsin is the global hotspot for blastomycosis, a life-threatening fungal infection. Researchers have developed a new testing method that provides results in 1 to 3 days, versus the current average of 6 weeks.
- Using AI to prevent opioid misuse. Researchers developed an artificial intelligence (AI) screening tool that successfully identifies hospitalized adults at risk for opioid use disorder. Patients identified for addiction medicine referrals by AI screening had 47% lower odds of being readmitted to the hospital within 30 days after their initial discharge, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in health care savings.
See more examples in the 2024 Year-in-Review summary from the UW ICTR.