UMass Chan Hosting Lecture On Firefighter Mental Health

WORCESTER, MA - The UMass Chan Medical School and the Last Call Foundation, an organization dedicated toward magnifying issues fire responders may face outside the line of duty, are hosting a lecture on firefighter mental health awareness.

On Friday March 14, the Division of Emergency Medical Services and Disaster Medicine will host the lecture from 3-5 p.m. in the Albert Sherman Center at UMass Chan.

"Firefighters notoriously have higher risks of occupational cancers and higher risk of suicide and mental health disorders," said Assistant Professor of emergency medicine Timothy Boardman, MD. "Many of these firefighters need their primary care physicians to be able to recognize occupational pathologies."

Kathy Crosby-Bell founded Last Call in honor of her son, Michael Kennedy, who died battling a nine-alarm fire in March 2014 in Boston's Back Bay.

The lecture itself is one installment in a new education and research program founded from a $200,000 gift from Last Call to Chan. The large endowment will help support a medical student curriculum involving standardized patient experiences with firefighters, research on their health and a lecture series.

"Programs like this help raise awareness and provide people who treat firefighters with a thorough understanding of what first responders deal with on a regular basis," said Adam Roche, the assistant chief of the Worcester Fire Department. "These programs also allow first responders to learn how to process these situations and recover from events so that they can come back to work healthy and have a healthy home life."