Providing Meaningful Support to Your Firefighters + Their Families

Being an emergency responder—or loving one—isn’t easy. Between the physical dangers, emotional stress, exposure to trauma, long shifts, holiday hours and feelings of “being under a microscope”—you face very unique relationship challenges as a result of your career or volunteerism that others will simply never understand. But you also know better than anyone else how important it is to have a support system when you’re in this industry—and that there are days when that support makes all of the difference.

Your fire department can help support your members and their personal relationships by:

1. Having open conversations about the relationship challenges you and your loved ones face
2. Sharing how others have learned to cope and develop healthy relationships in spite of those challenges
3. Planning gatherings for your team and their families to spend time together, talk about the demands of the job and communicate updates that could impact families (like upcoming commitments, shift changes and other organizational updates)
4. Sharing online groups, blogs and resources that are dedicated to supporting and empowering emergency responders’ families, like firefighterwife.com
5. Having a culture that shows appreciation for the commitment of members and their families
6. Providing an assistance program to your members and their families with help from true behavioral health experts—and encouraging everyone to utilize those services to help better themselves and their relationships

Wondering what types of assistance programs are available for your firefighters and their families?

VFIS is proud to offer a Member Family Assistance Program (MFAP) as an add-on to our Accident & Sickness Policy. This program supports the health and wellness of first responder employees, volunteers and the workplace and provides services to help enable personnel to resolve personal and work-related issues to maintain individual productivity, health and wellness.

Our Member Family Assistance Program gives employees, volunteers and their immediate family access to a holistic wellness solution for less than $12 a member for the year!

Highlights of VFIS’ MFAP include:

• Trained professionals who are experienced in counseling emergency service personnel
• Support services that are simple to use and available 24/7
• Treatment for a full-range of personal or work-related issues including addiction, substance abuse, child development and adolescent issues, aging and caregiving, anger management, depression, anxiety and more
• Lifestyle and Specialty Coaching for childcare and parenting, new parents, elder and family care, financial advisory, legal advisory and relationship solutions
• Health Coaching focused on nutrition, wellness and smoking cessation
• Career Coaching including development services, pre-retirement planning services and shift-worker support services
• Online Services like e-learning opportunities and health risk assessments

How to get MFAP for your firefighters:

While MFAP is a highlighted offering of our Accident & Sickness (A&S) coverage, the main purpose of A&S is to provide benefits to emergency responders and their families to help lessen the financial impacts of potential accidents, sicknesses and line of duty deaths. This product is specifically designed to fill in the gaps of traditional Workers’ Compensation policies, which don’t typically address the unique needs of emergency responders like pre-existing conditions, limits for heart conditions, junior members and auxiliary members.

If you’re interested in adding A&S with MFAP to your VFIS policy, or if you’re already an A&S client and you’d like to add MFAP for less than $12 per member per year, reach out to your insurance agent to learn more and get coverage—we’d love to partner with them to help provide more meaningful benefits to your members.