Narcisse asks about incentives and wellness supports for EMS

In the incentive, which I'm very much, you know, from my business background, incentive to keep them within the structure.

You give us advice and what we need to do, like what we all can do to let the EMS knows that we love them, we appreciate them, we respect them.

How about within the structure itself?

What are the incentives that you're giving beside the paycheck to help them, to encourage them to stay within the structure?

So the department offers a wide variety of different things.

I guess we can call or consider them incentives.

Like there is tuition reimbursement for college, right?

You can work here at the fire department and earn a degree.

Myself.

Myself sitting in front of you, earned my bachelor's and my master's degree through the assistance of the fire department.

So that is one way that

I guess we can call it an incentive to know that we have that backing.

We have other agencies like, I'm sorry, not agencies, but we have the FDNY Foundation.

We have the EMS Help Fund.

These are all, they all.

Collaborate and have programs with different type of assistance that they can provide to our members, including the unions.

The unions have a very substantial network of people who can assist them with financial

mortgages, you know, attorney, just other life things.

So when you look at that, and I don't know if we want to call them incentives, but we have these things available within the department, within the unions, within

organizations that are interested in helping us that you only get by being a part of this department.

About wellness, since we're dealing with a lot of stress, especially that kind of work that we do, like in the ER or EMT, to deal with clients, how are we addressing mental health, wellness, encouragement within the structure?

So the first part of...

Being able to address that is having someone come forward and say, I need help, right?

We can acknowledge that somebody may be having an issue and we can say to them, hey, we have these things available for you, like our peer support system, like our counseling service unit.

We partner with New York City well, right?

But we have to, people have to accept the help.

And we are working on breaking that stigma of being a sign of weakness to say something is bothering me.

You know, I spoke earlier about being able to save a life and deliver a baby, but there's nothing worse than having to look at a parent while you're unable to help their child, right?

Nothing worse than able to look at a child while you're unable to help their parent or their grandparent.

I can't tell you throughout my 27-year career how many times on Christmas morning I've worked cardiac arrest under a Christmas tree while families are watching.

Those are things that will weigh on you for the remainder of your life.

And it's up to you to be able to say, I need the help.

And this department is doing, along with the collaboration with the unions, is doing everything possible to be able to get people who need help, help.

Thank you.

Hero care and hero need care as well.

So thank you for your time.

Thank you.