Protect the people who answer the call with the Well-Being Index—the only Mayo Clinic-invented assessment that measures distress and well-being among first responders in under 60 seconds. Validated and trusted by 1,000+ organizations.
Climate surveys and morale polls weren't built to detect distress. The Well-Being Index is a clinically validated, Mayo Clinic-invented instrument with the rigor required to find the dimensions that drive turnover, injury, and crisis in public safety—and the credibility your chief, council, and carrier will trust.
With cumulative trauma and disrupted sleep elevating cardiac, cancer, and behavioral health risk, the Well-Being Index surfaces distress by station and shift before it becomes a line-of-duty injury or early retirement.
Where critical-incident exposure and a culture that penalizes asking for help keep distress invisible, the Well-Being Index earns honest answers anonymously and gives leadership the data to act.
In the highest-turnover workforce in healthcare—facing low pay, mandated overtime, and constant exposure to suffering—the Well-Being Index pinpoints which providers and shifts are at greatest burnout risk before they walk.
For dispatchers carrying vicarious trauma through long console shifts—and routinely excluded from field-focused peer support—the Well-Being Index brings the same evidence-based footing as every role in the field.
Independent national research has confirmed what every chief, sheriff, and EMS director already suspects: the first responder profession sits among the most distressed populations in the modern workforce—and the operational, human, and community consequences are now too large to leave unmeasured.
Including PTSD, depression, and substance use disorders—compared with roughly 20% in the general workforce.
From repeated trauma, mass-casualty incidents, and human suffering encountered in the line of duty.
Recruiting, academy, FTO, equipment, and lost productivity per separation—before counting overtime to cover the gap.
An estimated 1 in 5 first responders shows clinical PTSD symptoms—compared with ~7% of the general adult population.
"In a typical year, more police officers and firefighters die by suicide than from all line-of-duty deaths combined." The paper frames first responder mental health as a public safety crisis hidden in plain sight.
Impaired well-being correlates with the failures that matter most in emergency services: slowed reaction time, errors in patient and citizen contact, citizen complaints, use-of-force incidents, on-duty injuries, and early retirement.
See exactly where your department stands. Talk through your team's well-being data with a Well-Being Index expert.
Talk to a Well-Being Index ExpertA four-step process designed for fire, police, EMS, and dispatch leaders who need clean data, anonymity that earns honest answers, and a fast path from baseline to intervention to documented result.
License the validated Well-Being Index. Name your assessment, set a collection window, and define anonymous segments—division, station, shift, rank, or unit.
You decide who receives the link—sworn personnel, firefighters, EMS providers, dispatchers, civilian staff, or any combination. Each participant gets a private link and completes 9 questions in under a minute on any device.
Your dashboard surfaces results by segment and dimension, benchmarked against national norms. See who's thriving, who's struggling, and which dimensions are driving the picture across your agency.
Run the assessment quarterly, semi-annually, or alongside any initiative. The Well-Being Journey view tracks every dimension and segment over time—so command briefings, city council reports, union updates, and grant renewals are anchored in data, not anecdote.
Each dimension was identified and validated through years of Mayo Clinic research as an independent predictor of professional and personal consequence. Together they describe the full clinical picture that a one-dimensional burnout score will always miss.
Whether your responders experience the job as purposeful service, or as a shift they're enduring. The leading indicator of engagement and retention.
Emotional exhaustion and depersonalization—the dimensions most correlated with turnover intent, citizen complaints, and deteriorating scene performance.
Beyond tired: the depleted state that compromises split-second judgment, reaction time, and scene-safety decisions.
The dimension your veteran responders are quietly evaluating their careers against. Directly linked to retention and early-retirement intent.
Mental and physical quality of life—measured against normative national data so you can interpret what your agency's number actually means.
The dimension every other survey leaves out, in a profession where suicide deaths now exceed line-of-duty deaths. Measured anonymously, against clinical thresholds.
Protecting first responders demands a measurement instrument with the rigor to match the stakes. The Well-Being Index brings more than a decade of peer-reviewed Mayo Clinic research, with predictive validity established across high-stress professional populations including healthcare and public safety personnel.
Published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (August 2016) by Dyrbye, Satele, and Shanafelt, this study confirms the Well-Being Index as a validated assessment tool for predicting distress risk among U.S. workers, including firefighters, police officers, EMS providers, dispatchers, and the civilian staff who support them.
Whether you run the agency, run the wellness program, sign off on the budget, or advocate for the profession nationally, you'll get the resources, data, and platform needed to protect the people who answer the call.
Quantify the risk inside your hardest-to-quantify asset—your people. Anchor retention and succession conversations in clinical-grade evidence. Prove to your city council, your governing board, and the community that you measure and manage the wellness of those who answer the call.
Replace anecdotal check-ins and post-incident debriefs with a tool that has years of peer-reviewed validation. Target peer support, EAP, and clinical interventions where data shows they're needed most—and prove ROI quarter over quarter, in dimensions every chief and city manager will recognize.
Anchor the public-safety wellness budget in clinical-grade evidence. Quantify ROI on every wellness initiative you fund—and give your council, board, and risk team the data they need to keep investing in those who answer the call.
Offer your membership a validated, anonymous measurement standard—an instant member benefit, an aggregate national dataset, and the empirical foundation for behavioral-health policy and advocacy. Common licensors include the major fire, police, EMS, and 9-1-1 associations, plus state standards boards.
Climate surveys and morale polls weren't designed to detect distress. They miss the dimensions that drive turnover, injury, and crisis—because they were never validated to find them. Here's what your current instrument can't do that the Well-Being Index was built for.
| Well-Being Index | Climate / Pulse Survey | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to complete | Under 60 seconds · 9 questions | 15–40 minutes · 40–80+ questions |
| What it actually measures | Clinical distress & well-being across 6 validated dimensions | Sentiment, morale, engagement proxies |
| Predictive of turnover, errors, suicidal ideation | Yes — published, peer-reviewed | Not designed for clinical prediction |
| National benchmarks | Yes — against normative U.S. workforce data | Often vendor-specific or unavailable |
| Anonymity guarantee | 100% — individual responses never surfaced; minimum thresholds enforced | Varies — frequently identifiable at station or shift level |
| Grant & standards alignment | LEMHWA · HERO Act · NFPA 1500/1583 · IACP | Rarely structured for wellness grant reporting |
| Designed for repeated measurement | Built for it — quarterly cadence supported | Survey-fatigue limits frequency |
| Validated by independent research | Peer-reviewed studies; Mayo Clinic invented | Internal vendor reliability claims |
| Trusted by | 1,000+ organizations · ~1M assessments completed | Varies |
The Well-Being Index fits inside the federal grant programs, national standards, and presumption-law evidence requirements your agency already operates under. You're not asking your council for a new budget line—you're using ones that already exist.
The Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act of 2017 authorizes officer-wellness grants through DOJ's COPS Office. Validated mental-health measurement is an allowable—and increasingly expected—line item in those applications.
The FEMA Assistance to Firefighters Grant (AFG) program funds Wellness & Fitness initiatives, including behavioral-health measurement. SAMHSA and HHS programs add additional funding streams for fire and EMS behavioral health.
National standards now name behavioral-health measurement directly. 30+ states have workers' comp PTSD presumption laws for first responders—making agency-wide baseline data the most important evidence record you can build.
The questions you'll want answered before you walk this in to your chief, your city manager, your union, or your council.
Yes—and there is no credit card, no procurement form, and no commitment required. Every prospective agency gets full demo-account access populated with realistic live demo data, so you can navigate the dashboard, run an aggregate report, simulate launching a campaign, and see exactly what your agency's view would look like before you ever sign anything.
Yes. The Well-Being Index is an allowable expense under DOJ COPS Office LEMHWA Implementation grants, FEMA Assistance to Firefighters Grants (AFG), SAMHSA First Responder programs, and most state pass-through wellness funding. Agencies regularly use it to satisfy the "validated measurement" component of officer-wellness and behavioral-health grant applications. Our team can provide language for grant narratives and reporting on request.
Yes. NFPA 1500 requires fire departments to maintain a behavioral health program; the Well-Being Index provides the validated measurement component most programs lack. The IACP Officer Safety & Wellness Section framework explicitly recommends ongoing measurement of officer well-being—a function the Well-Being Index was designed for. The assessment can also serve as documentation for CFAI / CPSE accreditation behavioral-health criteria.
Architecturally—not by promise. Individual responses are never visible to administrators, command staff, supervisors, peer supporters, or even the vendor. The platform enforces minimum response thresholds before any segment is displayed, so a small unit or shift can't be back-calculated to an individual. Participants control whether to receive resources via their private account; agency leadership only ever sees aggregated, de-identified results. This is the only architecture that earns trust in a profession where stigma is the single greatest barrier to disclosure.
It can. More than 30 states now have workers' compensation presumption laws for first responder PTSD. The single biggest evidence gap in those cases—on both sides—is the absence of agency-wide baseline data. Quarterly aggregate Well-Being Index data establishes that record. Note: the platform never surfaces individual responses, so it complements rather than replaces clinical evaluation for individual claims.
Whichever populations you choose. A license can cover sworn personnel only, sworn plus dispatch, fire suppression plus EMS, or the full agency including civilian and administrative staff—segmented by division, station, shift, rank, or any custom dimension you define. The Well-Being Index is validated for the general U.S. workforce, so the same instrument applies across every role at your agency.
No. The Well-Being Index is a fully browser-based application—nothing to download, install, or run on your agency's network. Responders and civilian staff take the assessment on any device (mobile, MDT, station computer, personal phone), and administrators access the dashboard from any modern browser. No IT deployment, no endpoint footprint, no security review of installed software.
Most agencies are up and running within weeks. Setup is guided by a dedicated onboarding specialist and an organizational wellness expert who help you configure the campaign, populations, segments, and reminder cadence in the administrator console. SSO and roster imports are supported for agencies of any size, from a single-station volunteer department to a metropolitan agency with thousands of sworn personnel.
Pricing scales by population size and license duration, with options for single-campaign engagements and ongoing annual licenses. Many agencies cover licensing through LEMHWA, AFG, SAMHSA, or state wellness grant funds. The most efficient way to get an accurate quote—including a tailored ROI model against your agency's attrition and overtime costs—is a 30-minute briefing with our team.
Yes. State fire and police standards boards, IAFF locals, IACP regions, NAEMT chapters, FOP lodges, APCO & NENA networks, and national associations use the validated assessment to offer members anonymous self-measurement, aggregate de-identified data across the network, and inform training, behavioral health policy, and advocacy at the state and federal levels. Talk to us about the membership-network licensing structure.
What gets measured, gets managed—and the agencies leading this decade are the ones turning first responder wellness into a data-driven conversation instead of a hopeful one. Join more than 1,000 organizations already using the Well-Being Index to quantify distress, target interventions, and prove what worked.
A short walkthrough of the platform and exactly what your command staff would see, narrated by our team.
Watch the tourFree, instant access to a live demo environment loaded with realistic agency data. Click through dashboards, segments, and reports at your own pace.
Open the demoA live walkthrough with our team, tailored to your agency's structure—plus a custom ROI model built around your attrition, overtime, and workers' comp exposure.
Book a briefingLet's have a conversation about your well-being goals and needs and how the Well-Being Index can help.
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