@article{ref1,
title="Physical employment standard for Canadian wildland fire fighters; developing and validating the test protocol",
journal="Ergonomics",
year="2018",
author="Gumieniak, Robert J. and Gledhill, Norman and Jamnik, Veronica K.",
volume="61",
number="10",
pages="1311-1323",
abstract="Developing the Canadian initial attack (IA) wildland fire fighter (WFF) physical employment standard (WFX-FIT) began in a previous investigation (Gumieniak et al. 2018) with a physical demands analysis in which hand and back carrying a 28.5 kg pump, back carrying a 25 kg hose pack and advancing charged hose were identified as the critical IA emergency tasks. In the present study, a circuit was created incorporating simulations of the critical tasks with faster completion times required for provinces with more arduous terrains. The oxygen cost (mean ± SD VO<sub>2</sub> mL∙kg<sup>-1</sup>∙min<sup>-1</sup>) of performing IA WFF tasks sequentially on the job was 37±6 compared to 37±4 when performing the WFX-FIT, indicating strong construct validity. Content validation ratings comparing the likeness of on-the-job tasks to simulated tasks in the WFX-FIT provided strong agreement. These validations confirm that the physical demands involved in performing the WFX-FIT are the same as IA wildland fire fighting. Practitioner Summary: This paper details the process used to develop and validate the physical employment standard for jurisdictional employment and national exchange of IA WFF. The range of cut-scores reflects the differences in jurisdictional physical demands due to terrain difficulty, fire management policy on fire risk and forest value index.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0014-0139",
doi="10.1080/00140139.2018.1462408",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00140139.2018.1462408"
}