Washington DC Fire and EMS Capt. Oleg Pelekhaty knew early on while attending the Center for Homeland Defense and Security that he wanted to research ways to improve fireground decision-making and operational performance in high-stress firefighting situations, making that clear during his introduction session.
So Pelekhaty (master’s cohort 2101/2102) focused his CHDS Master’s thesis on developing mental skills training for his fire department, working with cognitive scientist Dr. Mollie McGuire and Master’s Program Manager and Adjunct Prof. Dr. Lauren Fernandez to develop and conduct an experiment on a fire recruit class that found mental skills training had beneficial effects, and develop a research-based mental skills training curriculum.
As a direct result of Pelekhaty’s research, contained in his thesis entitled “The Effect of Mental Skills Training on Firefighter Performance Under Stress,” his department is now providing mental skills training as part of its training program, and he is working on writing and publishing an article about his research aimed at sharing his findings with the larger homeland security community.
According to Pelekhaty’s thesis, “Firefighting is a physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding profession. Firefighters make time-pressured, high-consequence decisions while performing physically challenging tasks, often under extreme environmental conditions. However, training efforts focus primarily on strategy, tactics, and physical performance and do not offer firefighters strategies for mitigating the negative effects of stress on human performance.”
“My thesis tested the effect of an established stress intervention (mental skills training or MST) on firefighters,” he said. “While MST has been used successfully in other fields like military and law enforcement, there is limited research on its application in the fire department. The experiment conducted during my time at CHDS showed promising results in the ability of a tailored MST curriculum to reduce firefighters’ physiological stress response.”
Pelekhaty said he deployed a double-blind experiment where he gave a group of recruits a 45-minute MST lecture and another group an unrelated lecture on nutrition and its effects on performance, then tested their physiological stress response using a scenario and heart rate monitors. He said the group that received the MST lecture demonstrated a “more tempered response,” which he called a “promising finding.”
Oleg Pelekhaty’s thesis
The Effect of Mental Skills Training on Firefighter Performance Under Stress
Presenting his thesis and the experiment’s results to his department’s executive leadership team and training academy staff, he said he was able to show “there was a lot of potential with very little investment” to implement an MST program and grow it into targeted training for different levels of the department from recruit to executive officers while focusing “less on the physical aspects of firefighting, which we tend to focus on and more on the cognitive aspect.”
“I’m hoping to develop that further into a full-fledged curriculum that we can deliver at the company or battalion level,” he said.
As part of that effort, Pelekhaty has developed a series of lectures tailored for newly promoted company officers, including the following: Train Your Brain for Stress; Observe and Orient; Deliberate Cold Exposure—Cross Adaptation for Fire Department Stress; Effects of Sleep on Performance; and Leadership Lessons from the New Zealand All Blacks.
Those are also being delivered to other departments in the region including agencies in Northern Virginia and Baltimore, and Pelekhaty said he believes in sharing the training as widely as possible.
“One of the things that i’ve always been frustrated with is how exclusive and gate-kept some of these things are and I want to make (the training) as widely available to as many people as possible,” he said. “If we discover something or if we develop something that’s useful that should be shared with everyone.”
Meanwhile, Pelekhaty is also working on a groundbreaking initiative to study the way firefighters search for victims in unfamiliar, smoke-obscured environments, partnering with a firefighter and architect from Seattle, WA, Fire Department and a George Washington University professor who studies the way humans navigate to design a series of experiments to measure how DC firefighters “wayfind” in a fire.
“We intend to apply interventions to develop their orientation skills,” he said. “The ultimate goal is to design a research based curriculum for conducting search and rescue operations, something that is largely absent from the fire department educational space.”
Pelekhaty is the company commander of Rescue Squad 3, a special operations unit based in the historic Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, DC. He also serves as the President of the Kentland Volunteer Fire Department in nearby Landover, MD.
He completed his bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2008, and has continued his educational journey since both at the college level and through the various technical training courses offered by the Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute, the DCFD, FEMA, and beyond.
