Neurodiversity Celebration Week
Our Service will be running a week-long campaign as part of Neurodiversity Celebration Week between 18th- 24th March.
This campaign provides the perfect opportunity for staff to celebrate the valuable contribution of neurodiverse people in the fire and rescue service.
In 2023, our Service ran an internal campaign which focused on a different type of neurodiversity each day, this year we will be focussing on a different theme each day including; Neurodiversity Staff Network; The development of a peer support network, reasonable adjustments; assistance technologies, software and resources; and neurodiversity screening.
We are very fortunate to have so many neurodiverse staff working in different departments in our service.
For those who are unaware of the term ‘Neurodiversity’, Neuro means ‘brain’ and diverse means ‘different’, so it makes logical sense to have people that think differently in a fire and rescue service because our staff (and the public) benefit from being innovative, creative, problem solvers and being able to devise solutions quickly.
Benji Evans, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Officer said:
‘‘As a Service, we truly value having a diverse workforce and neurodiverse staff play an important role in keeping our communities safe.It takes a real team effort - we currently have over 900+ staff who work together to prevent, protect and respond.
"Please let me explain how typical neurodiverse traits and characteristics are associated with service delivery.
"Firstly, we value fire safety staff that devise creative projects that raise awareness amongst the public and local businesses to prevent fires and other emergencies. We value the communications team that develop innovative ways to communicate key messages to the public.
"When emergencies do occur, we rely on the attention to detail and exceptional knowledge of control staff who take the initial call, before they dispatch resources to an incident.
"The firefighters that response to emergencies require excellent spatial awareness, perception and visual thinking, with experience and advanced skills, these firefighters become our incident commanders. Behind the scenes, we have talented people in each department with strategic thinking skills, organisational skills, pattern recognition, extensive capacity for knowledge and memory.
"We have committed and passionate staff with outstanding communication skills. Some staff prefer written, some prefer verbal in different languages and some prefer non-verbal, including BSL.
"Not everyone is outstanding at all types of communication, but we are fortunate to have a team that prefer different communication types because this helps our managers assign tasks accordingly; what we call having the right skills, in the right place, at the right time.
"All the words in bold are often associated with being neurodiverse. Our Service strive to become more inclusive and we are proud of the progressions we have made in recent years.
"Because we place so much value on having neurodiverse people in our team, we have embedded neurodiversity awareness in our staff inductions. We screen staff for dyslexia and other neurodiverse traits that align to autism, dyspraxia and attention. We have hundreds of resources and practical adjustments that enable us to meet the diverse needs of staff including providing learning materials in different formats, separate learning spaces, assistance technologies, read/write software, extra time for exams to name a few.
"All staff receive Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) training (inclusive of neurodiversity awareness content) and training is delivered through formal qualifications and e-learning modules, while informal awareness campaigns, workshops and seminars are available for staff."
If you would like to learn more about our work around neurodiversity or broader EDI work, please contact benji.evans@northwalesfire.gov.wales.