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Abstract
Position Statement: Emergency Incident Rehabilitation
The National Association of EMS Physicians® believes that:
Emergency operations and training conducted while wearing protective clothing and respirators is physiologically and cognitively demanding.
The heat stress and fatigue created by working in protective clothing and respirators creates additional risk of illness/injury for the public safety provider.
Emergency incident rehabilitation provides a structured rest period for rehydration and correction of abnormal body core temperature following work in protective clothing and respirators.
Emergency incident rehab should be conducted at incidents (e.g. fireground, hazardous materials, and heavy rescue emergencies) and trainings involving activities that may lead to exceeding safe levels of physical and mental exertion.
Emergency incident rehabilitation is incident care, not fitness for duty, and meant to reduce physiologic strain and prepare the responder to return to duty at the current incident and for the remainder of the shift.
EMS should play a role in emergency incident rehabilitation with providers trained to understand the physiologic response of healthy individuals to environmental, exertional, and cognitive stress and implement appropriate mitigation strategies.
An appropriately qualified physician should have oversight over the creation and implementation of emergency incident rehabilitation protocols and may be separate from the roles and responsibilities of the occupational medicine physician.
There are no peer-reviewed data related to cold weather rehabilitation. Future studies should address this limitation to the literature.