June 10, 2004

Assistant fire chief focusing on improving MTFR service

New Assistant Fire Chief Denny Powell joined Miami Township Fire-Rescue in 1989 as a student at Antioch College and was promoted to the full-time position in April.

Ever since he was little, Denny Powell has wanted to be a fire chief. He probably could have gone just about anywhere to reach that goal, but when Miami Township Fire-Rescue offered him a full-time job as assistant fire chief at the beginning of April, he chose to stay in Yellow Springs.

“It’s a community that grows on you, and you don’t want to leave,” he said.

Powell first came to Yellow Springs as an Antioch student in 1989 and began volunteering with both the campus fire department, Maples, and the Township fire department. He served as chief of Maples before training as a paramedic and joining the Greene Memorial Hospital emergency squad in 1994, all the while volunteering with the Township department. Even while he worked at GMH, he continued to serve in Yellow Springs as part-time assistant chief, a position he shared with former Assistant Chief Hope Robbins.

Even now he teaches student- and instructor-training courses through Clark State Community College and the Greene County Career Center, as well as offering evening training courses at Miami Township.

“Fire people almost always have two to three jobs,” he said, shrugging his shoulders at the fact that in the last week he taught a long Tuesday night continuing education course and put in an entire weekend of rope rescue training, on top of a 40-hour work week, for which he is paid $40,000 a year.

As an EMS and fire instructor, Powell said he feels satisfaction when others get excited about the things emergency personnel can do to help people. He said that he has mentored many students in Yellow Springs and surrounding communities and proudly watched them rise in rank in their respective departments.

“I was bit by becoming an instructor,” he said, calling instructing one of the most fun things he does. “It’s kind of neat to watch people grow and know that a lot of people who are coming up in the ranks got a lot of their training from me,” he said.

Powell is accustomed to watching things grow and helping to improve the places where he has worked. At GMH, he said, he spent considerable energy on performance improvement (PI) audits and was able to streamline the emergency department to operate more efficiently and meet more of the community’s needs.

“I knew PI was a good thing, but it wasn’t until I started seeing firsthand the benefits in terms of people’s attitudes that I realized it works because the changes aren’t punitive but motivational. I expect to see similar things here,” he said of Miami Township Fire-Rescue.

Since being promoted to full-time assistant chief, Powell has designed and implemented a more comprehensive database system to track emergency call statistics. His theory is if the department knows its response times, IV insertion and intubation success rates and the minute details of volunteer activity, training activities can focus on areas that need improvement. Better record keeping will also allow the department more ease in applying for state training grants and justify the need to purchase new equipment, he said.

Data entry can be time consuming, he said, which is why Powell has also proposed a $13,000 technological upgrade over two years to install an intradepartmental network system, update training and data entry software, and purchase laptops to avoid what he called the duplicated paperwork of record keeping. More sophisticated networking will also allow Fire-Rescue personnel to see building floor plans for easy entry and access hazardous materials information of specific locations and businesses, he said.

Powell said that he intends to institute the performance improvement system and eventually establish a three-person committee for systematic review of EMS reports. By next year he hopes to be able to roll out a new EMS reporting system.

He will also continue to do all of the Township’s EMS training and some fire-rescue training, which, he said, will help him to maintain his own certifications to teach basic and advanced cardiac life support and adult and pediatric advanced cardiac life support.

Powell said that he already sees areas in need of improvement at Miami Township Fire-Rescue. The department needs more volunteers, especially those willing to train as paramedics, he said, and current staff members and volunteers could improve their IV insertion techniques and documentation processes. The new data review standards will help to identify more clearly the areas of greatest need, he said.

“Hopefully, we’ll get ourselves in a position to satisfy our members so that they will be more willing to commit to the department,” Powell said. “It will help improve our care for our patients and therefore our service to the community.”

—Lauren Heaton