"Context: The project was concerned with improving safety in fireground operations though the development of an interactive software tool for assessing and training fireground Situation Awareness (understanding of the immediate situation) and decision-making patterns. Past work by the team has shown that under pressure, professional training and competence per se does not fully protect Fire and Rescue Service (FRS) personnel from the risk of losing Situation Awareness and so making errors. These errors are due to decision-making tendencies or ""biases"" due to either of two patterns: either ""tunnelling down"" on aspects of the situation and overlooking others, or alternately attempting to deal with too much information at once. The former pattern will cause ""miss"" errors whereby key information may not be taken on board, and the latter pattern will cause ""false alarms"" where irrelevant or even incorrect information may be used to make decisions. Even with the highest levels of training and skill, individuals can still make such errors. These are due to natural limitations of the human brain under pressure. Such tendencies are addressed in training for many other situations where human decision-making is under pressure (e.g, aircraft , military, medical contexts) but have yet to be noticeably incorporated in VET for Fire services.Objectives: The main objective of the project was to develop an online interactive software tool to enable Fire Service personnel to engage in realistic simulations of fire service operations and receive immediate feedback about their Situation Awareness and type of decision bias (whether they ""tunnel down"" or ""broaden out"") followed by guidance for improvement and self-monitoring of Situation Awareness and bias. This will provide the personnel with immediate insights into their own decision-making patterns and tendencies and provide means by which to self-monitor these tendencies under pressure on the actual fireground. The broad objective was to add value to their training by increasing their awareness of possible decision-making tendencies that could produce errors and cause risk during their fireground operations. Participants: Participants were Fire and Rescue Service personnel from the EU partner FRS centres, both firefighters and commanders (managers). Between ten and twenty per EU partner centre were be involved in the project.Activities: The project involved the following sequence of activities: (1.) an initial visit by UK partners to all EU Fire Service partner sites to demonstrate and explain the basic approach and collect information on local requirements for further development (2) subsequent development of the tool for each of the EU sites by researchers and then by the UK partners with a technician to enhance the user-interface; (3.) a second visit by UK team to support the initial trials of the tool in each EU partner site ; (4.) the EU partners then sent feedback and outputs to the UK teams for coordination and final revision; (5.) the tool was refined by the U.K. team; (6.) the EU partners sent representatives to a workshop in the UK to review the final version; (7.) the final version of the tool to be implemented as a web portal - activity led by PLOT (8.) dissemination activities ongoing.Methodology: The method involved trials at each of the EU partner sites of interactive computer-based fireground exercises optimised for local users. A range of exercises were trialled, each presenting a series of images and video material representing the exercise interspersed with ""probe"" questions to be answered ""true/false"" (eg., ""there was a gas cylinder at the building entrance""). A quantitative method in the analysis software produced a Situation Awareness score and a Bias tendency score (tunnel bias vs. broaden bias). This was followed by qualitative feedback and further training activities can be implemented in the software specific to the individual's results. Participants in the trials to were invited to reflect on the results and provide feedback on the perceived value of the method and suggest ways to develop it . This feedback has been used by the UK teams for further refinement of the tool.Impact/results: The impact is that the EU Fire Services community have a valuable, accessible and innovative tool that provides improved understanding of an individual's Situation Awareness and Decision-making bias tendencies and provides guidance on ways to self-check and improve on these critical aspects of foreground operations.Long-term potential benefits: For the individual FRS personnel who employ this tool, this will ultimately enable them to perform at a higher level under pressure on the actual fireground and hence reduce decision-making error, thereby improving safety for Fire and Rescue services and for the wider community that they serve."

"Firefighters are ranked as one of the most trustworthy professions across all global regions (source: Trust in professions, GFK Verein, 2015). Therefore, firefighters have the potential to do something more for their communities than firefighting. Being aware of this, some firefighters have already used their trustworthy position to promote social inclusion with very successful results. As an example you can watch ""The story of Zouhair"" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoTPcFWehiAThis proves that something is changing in the Fire and Rescue Services. Firefighters are more aware of their potential to do something more for their communities. However, a lot more could be done if firefighters could access high quality training on how to use their position as role models to promote social inclusion. In this context, the Firefighters Plus project aims at helping firefighters use their position as role models to promote social inclusion. To do so, five Fire and Rescue Services and two NGOs with wide experience in the field of social inclusion have developed the first online platform for firefighters on how to use their position as role models to promote social inclusion. The online platform is accessible from computers, tablets and smartphones in six languages (English, Danish, Spanish, Polish, Dutch and Romanian) at www.firefightersplus.eu and it has the following sections: GET INSPIRED with videos from actions to promote social inclusion implemented by firefighters from several EU countries during the project.ONLINE TRAINING on how firefighters can make the most of their position as role models to promote social inclusion.TOOLS to plan, implement, evaluate and disseminate the results of actions to promote social inclusion. GOOD PRACTICES where firefighters can submit their good practices to be shared with and inspire other firefighters.Once the first development of the online platform was completed, it was tested by firefighters from 5 countries. The firefighters first completed the online training course and afterwards, they put in practice what they had learnt by planning and implementing actions to promote social inclusion in each country. Based on the testers’ feedback, the project partners implemented additional improvements before the final publication of the Firefighters Plus online platform in September 2019. Beyond the partners, the Firefighters Plus online platform has the potential to be exploited by a wide range of organisations and individuals across the EU. Thanks to its publication as an OER (Open Educational Resource) under the Creative Commons license “Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)"", anyone is allowed to use all the content for free as well as to build upon. Therefore, the Firefighters Plus online platform will serve as the impetus for future innovations and developments in the education and training sector across the EU. Within the next two months after the publication of the Firefighters Plus online platform, the impact is already well over initial expectations: - The Firefighters Plus online platform won the European Fire Safety Award 2019. - The Firefighters Plus online platform was presented as a good practice in the European Forum on Integration of Migrants and Refugees in Hamburg (Germany).- The Firefighters Plus online platform was presented as a good practice in the International Safety Education Seminar in Antwerp (Belgium).- In Poland, the National Chief Fire Officer has recommended all firefighters across the country use the Firefighters Plus online platform.- In the Netherlands, Firefighters Plus online platform was presented at the Dutch Fire Congress.The Firefighters Plus project is an initiative of Frederiksborg Fire & Rescue Service (Denmark) in collaboration with Northumberland Fire & Rescue Service (UK), Provincial Headquarters of State Fire Service in Poznan (Poland), The Institute for Safety (The Netherlands), Alcala de Guadaira Fire & Rescue Service (Spain), Ethnocultural Diversity Resource Center (Romania) and WIOSNA Association (Poland). The Firefighters Plus project has been co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union."

There are over 2.4 million firefighters across EU countries reflecting a vast professional population requiring innovative and effective vocational training. One of the primary (if not the primary) causes of accidents or, ‘near misses,’ on the fireground is a loss of, ‘situation awareness’ (Trippett, 2007). Situation awareness (SA) represents the capacity of the human brain to maintain an accurate understanding of a situation when there are many competing demands. Under pressured fireground operations, even the best-trained individual may have poor SA. When this occurs, key information may be overlooked or dismissed, or faulty information may be used to make critical decisions.A tool to assess SA in terms of information awareness has previously been developed in the FireMind project funded under the Erasmus+ programme and this tool has been successfully used, for example by the Fire Service Academy (IFV) in the Netherlands (Bomhof, 2017). FireMind has proved very successful in measuring SA in terms of how aware firefighters are of the information available to them (Arendtsen et al., 2016) and whether they tend to accept or reject available information when making decisions.The FireFront project has added an entirely new capability by introducing measures into the tool that assess not only firefighters’ SA, but also an entirely new measure of ‘situation understanding’ (SU), or ‘sensemaking’. SU is concerned not just with how much information an individual is aware of (and using to make decisions), but the understanding of that information. Highly trained individuals, such as firefighters, will use their knowledge, experience, and training to augment the sensory information available, predict what is likely to happen, and so support their decision-making. Whereas FireMind assessed awareness of information from the fireground, FireFront assesses firefighters’ understanding of the importance of that information; the tool name reflecting the likely involvement of higher cognitive functions in frontal brain regions in situation understanding.The aim of the FireFront project has been to develop the SA and SU measures as part of a complete ‘package’ that will present a scenario to firefighters, assess their SA and SU, and then give individualised feedback on their performance and what it means. Within the current project, the tool has been implemented across a number of training platforms as originally proposed as Output 03 (Methodologies for applying FireFront across different training platforms).The target group in this project are firefighters and those involved in their training. The three tool-versions have been used to successfully test over 1,700 firefighters across four countries – as well as 700 non-firefighters. The tool has been very well received by end-users. The online version of the tool incorporates a Likert rating scale asking firefighters how useful they found the training delivered by the tool to be (1, not useful – 10, very useful). The mean score was 8.2.Dissemination activities in the Netherlands and Estonia were very well received. The project generated a lot of interest, not just within the firefighting community, but also other groups including the other emergency services and the military. The flexibility of the tool means that any group could easily adapt the approach for use in their own training, and discussions to facilitate this are ongoing.