President's Update
Presidents Update
November 2011
I would like to start off by thanking Terry Hubbard for her vision and all of her hard work since this Association first began. I am grateful that she will be staying on the Executive Board as Past President to continue to assist in move this Association forward.
As I take over as your current President I offer you some goals that the Executive Board has discussed. We are grateful that the OAFC accepted our two resolutions last year. You can read more about those on the website in the Committees Section. As we continue to work towards those goals, we have decided that they are great long term achievements and we now need to move ahead and establish some short term goals for the Association.
We will be working with our OAFC contacts to share our vision for these short term goals. Several things that we want to get started on are establishing some committees. This is where you as members come in. We are currently working on putting some information together for you to review on the website that will explain the goals of each of these committees and the estimated time that you would need to commit to participate. We feel we have selected 3 or 4 things that will interest most of you working in fire communications today and we hope to get these committees off the ground in early 2012.
Below is a very brief explanation of the committees we are currently working on:
Training – we all are conducting training, creating training, seeking out new ways to accomplish training and for the most part we do this on our own within our respective agencies. We are looking to create a dynamic training group who can find out where we are now, what fire communicators need and give us some great tools to use in our communications centres for training!
Quality Assurance/Quality Management – quality management has always been there in one form or another, we all hold ourselves to an increasingly high standard. The importance of feedback to communicators cannot be understated. We are looking to create a committee to see what methods are currently being used now, what is the information gathered and how are these results being used. We are hoping to be able to provide information to communications centres that they can utilize as it relates to quality issues in the communications centre.
Provincial and Federal Long Service Medals – we have been approached by our membership stating that there seems to be a certain amount of inconsistency on communicators receiving these medals. Our goal is to research what has happened so far, work with the OAFC and the groups distributing the medals to assist communicators in understanding what long service medals they are eligible for.
The Executive Board hopes to accomplish the establishment of these committees and benefit from their findings in 2012. We also need to work on the marketing of our Association and hope to increase our Departmental members in 2012!
Please contact us anytime, remember, this is OUR Association!
Sue Dawson
