What does the Wear in WearARMR mean?

Our mission to protect the lives of firefighters and other first responders started with a ton of research. We dove into rehabilitation standards and guidelines from the FEMA/USFA Emergency Incident Rehabilitation guide (2008) and NFPA 1584, we looked at how people think and act in emergencies, we talked to first responders (firefighters, EMTs, and police officers), and we looked back through our own experiences to determine just what the ideal firefighter rehabilitation system should look like. We went through several phases:

What are the characteristics of the best systems?

First we needed to understand what makes the best systems so special and effective. EMS is held together with lukewarm coffee and mnemonic devices like OPQRST for pain, AVPU for responsiveness, even DCAPBTLS for physical assessments, so we decided whatever system we had must be easy to remember

• Flexible - Our system also needed to be flexible and applicable anywhere, in any operation, at any time of day, in any weather. For example, you're not worried that triage "won't work in this rain..." It always works! It reacts to the situation you're in right now, and NOT the one that only appears in training.
• Simple - Emergencies by their very definition are emergent, and time is of the essence. Any system you need to use needs to be easy and quick to understand, and easy to explain to others who don't understand yet. That way you can spend the time and energy to focus on what really matters: patient care and transport.
• Sustainable - You never know how long an operation will last, but you can sure bet it's going to be just a bit longer than it's comfortable. Therefore our system needed to be able to run for 5 hours, 5 days, 5 weeks, or 5 months without putting firefighters' lives at risk.
• Modular - Operations grow and shrink organically, as dictated by the demands of the incident; nothing can fall through the cracks. Therefore, any system we put together needed to do the same, again: without putting firefighters' lives at risk.
• Idiot-Proof - Stress is no joke, and it can have a massive effect on our ability to function. Not exactly what you want in the middle of an emergency. Our system needed to be incredibly easy to implement under stress, because that's how it would actually be used.

Therefore to make a good system, we just had to make sure it did all of these things. And it does! So what came next?

What does our system have?

We looked at the list of "functions of rehab" in the USFA, FEMA, and NFPA documents and came to one immediate conclusion: this is way too complicated, and not at all memorable.

So we simplified rehab into four distinct purposes (each with two reminders) and made it an acronym to help you remember:

• Accountability (In & Out)
• Rest (Climate & Duties)
• Medical (Evaluation & Treatment)
• Replenishment (Fluids & Nutrients)

We figured out that the easiest way to make our system simple and idiot-proof was to make the roles distinct and obvious, as well as referenceable and transferrable at any time. How? By creating role cards on lanyards. How do you best use ARMR to protect firefighters? You WEAR it around your neck.

So that's why we're "Wear" ARMR: because you wear the key part of our system that protects firefighters.

Learn more about how WearARMR fulfills each of the other criteria in our hands-on, engaging, "best class I've ever taken" training by requesting a class near you!