The Center for Public Safety Excellence (CPSE) is home to innovative training workshops designed specifically for fire and emergency service agencies. Created to aid emergency service personnel in achieving continuous quality improvement, our workshops are held at a variety of locations across the United States and internationally.
View and register for our 2013 workshops
CFAI Basic Workshop Series
The CFAI Basic Workshop Series includes two workshops, held over three days, that are required for agency accreditation managers and highly encouraged for agency heads and all members of the agency accreditation team.
CFAI Self-Assessment Workshop (2 days)
This 16-hour workshop assists fire and emergency service leaders in preparing for and working toward accreditation through a unique self-assessment model. This workshop provides valuable information on conducting an agency self-assessment and how to prepare for an on-site peer assessment visit.
The workshop:
- Explains the benefits of self-assessment and, ultimately, accreditation.
- Defines the planning requirements for self-assessment.
- Reviews the self-assessment process and the performance activities that define it.
- Prepares fire and emergency service personnel for a successful self-assessment.
- Prepares fire and emergency service personnel for an on-site peer evaluation.
Each student receives a workshop participant manual and the latest edition of the Fire and Emergency Service Self-Assessment Manual (FESSAM).
CFAI Basic Standards of Cover (SOC) Workshop (1 day)
This eight-hour workshop equips fire service personnel to rationally plan for and justify various levels of service. The workshop uses an overview of resource deployment planning and community risk analysis to cover the latest tools for calculating and analyzing risk—and the latest processes for mapping deployment and deployment coverage areas, such as Geographic Information System (GIS) software packages.
The workshop:
- Explains a process that allows agencies to determine their level of service performance in a consistent manner.
- Reviews the CFAI definition of the planning requirements to be considered in the self-assessment process.
- Defines methods agencies can use to determine the levels of service appropriate for its responsibilities and risks.
- Defines methods of developing a Standards of Response Coverage report.
Each student receives a workshop participant manual and the latest edition of the CFAI Standards of Cover manual.
Chief Officer Designation - A Guide to Completing the Process
This four-hour workshop explains the benefits of the prestigious CFO designation and the components of the designation process. Participants learn how to prepare a candidate portfolio and maintain the designation after it's earned.
Data Analysis and Presentation Using Microsoft Excel
The Data Analysis and Presentation class, offered in cooperation with FireStats, LLC., is a three-day heavily hands-on with Microsoft Excel™ workshop. You will be learning not just how to create the statistics, charts, graphs and tables that describe your department’s performance; you will learn how to select the correct measures, do the work, and interpret and present the findings.
The class incorporates basic Excel™, statistics, and fire service-specific analysis techniques. In addition to basic Excel™ the following are some of the things you will learn:
Percentiles: What are they? How do we generate them? Why are they good measures of performance in some cases and weak, misunderstood and misused in others?
Unit Concentration and Effective Response Force: How to calculate, when do the measures work and when do they not work? How to compensate for small data sets.
Reliability: Its usefulness and weakness as a performance measure.
Analyzing Response Times: How to measure the relationships between time of day, incident type, location of unit, etc., and response times. What are the relationships between turnout, travel and response times? What do these relationships mean in the context of your own department’s resource deployment?
Understanding and Analyzing Large Data Sets:How much data do we actually need to analyze in order to understand out department’s performance? Did we exclude some data and include others? If so, how to decide where to set the upper and lower thresholds for those data sets? How do we explain to the public and our peers how our analyses actually work?
This class is a “must” for anyone working in or with accreditation and/or any kind of performance measurement as the skills and knowledge you acquire in this course are portable across most aspects of your department operations, including training, EMS, and prevention.
Each student must bring with them to the class a laptop computer with Microsoft Excel. No statistics, advanced mathematics, or Excel experience is required.
Keys to Successful Mentoring
The Chief Officer Mentoring Program is designed to match tenured, experienced mentors with protégés (less experienced chiefs and chief officers). There are approximately 32,000 fire chiefs in the United States and, on average, we lose 3-4 a month due to retirements. As fire service leaders, we have a fundamental responsibility to develop our future leaders. Succession planning and the development of leaders is one of the greatest challenges we are facing in the fire service. The mass amounts of retirements in recent years have exacerbated this challenge.
This program is designed to prepare chief officers to step into their roles with real-world dialog beyond the formal academic and certificate tracks. Keys to Successful Mentoring is not only designed to assist peers and colleagues outside our departments, but can be adopted to assist the local fire chief within their organization. This four-hour workshop will provide instruction on best practices in mentoring, implementing a mentoring program within your department, how to become a mentor for the CPC program and the matching of mentors to protégés.
Advanced Technology for Community Risk/Standards of Cover
Designed for accreditation managers and their GIS specialists, this one-day seminar (or five-week webinar) focuses on using GIS and related tools to conduct the analysis required to complete the CFAI Community Risk and Standards of Cover (SOC) process. The workshop covers the data necessary to use GIS and Excel software and produce the exhibits necessary for a defendable Community Risk/SOC study.
The workshop provides training in:
- Completing a Public Safety Data/Application Matrix Worksheet in order to conduct a data needs assessment
- Identifying locations that may be good sources of data for their agency and accessing and downloading that data
- Accessing data sets from multiple websites
- Assembling the data to create the set of exhibits for the community being served
- Techniques and methodologies for refining data into risk categories
- Identifying the data sets and their relative data components needed to model risk and prepare the required risk exhibits
- Using population data to create population density areas that align with the current CFAI FESSAM
- Techniques to develop Risk Demand Zones
- Data sets needed to create the exhibits that represent distribution and concentration of services provided
- Extracting performance analysis data from GIS data sets
- Using GIS and Excel to analyze how emergency workloads impact unit and system performance
- Calculating the remaining capacity for a unit or first due area
- Calculating and assessing stop loss points
- Assessing peak loading by TOD and DOW
- Assessing performance by unit, shift, TOC, and DOW
- Analysis and reporting strategies to maintain awareness of current system performance
- Analysis to anticipate the deployment of resources when necessary to maintain service level objectives
This workshop is offered in two formats:
- Live 8 hour workshop
- Five week virtual distance learning
CFAI Peer Assessor Workshop
This eight-hour workshop provides live webinars, virtual coursework, and a final exam over four weeks to prepare members of on-site peer assessment teams to evaluate and validate information submitted for CFAI Accreditation. This workshop is also valuable for accreditation managers who can gain experience and knowledge for their own site visits by conducting site assessments.
The workshop provides training in:
- Evaluating agency performance in a fair and consistent manner
- Characteristics and skills required of a peer assessor
- Duties and responsibilities of the Team Leader
- Team preparations, behavioral guidelines, documentation requirements, rating processes, and anticipated schedule of events
- Preparing team worksheets, recording techniques, and applying appropriate ratings to areas evaluated
Dayroom Discussions
Informal and dynamic dayroom discussions among accreditation managers have solved some of the greatest problems faced by fire and public safety agencies, our communities, our nation, and even our world. In these discussions, all participants are equal, participate, and share ideas, but usually at least one person provides the straight scope for the rest of the group.
CFAI reserves 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm EST on the second Friday of each month for our own online dayroom discussions with the people responsible for coordinating their departments' accreditation processes. They may represent Registered, Applicant, or Accredited agencies. The discussion begins with 20-minute point of insight from the CFAI Program Manager, followed by the answering of questions and exchange of advice among all participants. Register here for the next Dayroom Discussions.
Cancellation Policy
Cancellations subject to a $25 administrative fee and must be in writing (telephone cancellations will not be accepted) to CPSE via fax (703-961-0113) or email (info@publicsafetyexcellence.org) no later than 10 days prior to workshop start date. Workshop cancellation form can be found on the CPSE website using the following link: http://publicsafetyexcellence.org/Forms.aspx. No refunds will be processed after this date however registration fee may be applied to another scheduled workshop. Attendee substitutions will be allowed and may be made in writing to info@publicsafetyexcellence.org. Full registration fee is forfeited for workshop no shows.