Response Reliability Review

Structure Fire Order of Arrival

The final time performance measure illustrates the measurement of time it takes for multiple apparatus to arrive on the scene of structure fires. While initial units can begin firefighting operations, additional personnel and apparatus are needed to safely mitigate the incident. The figure below illustrates the time measures for arrival of additional units. This analysis was limited to the combined career/volunteer data sets as described earlier.

Figure 115. Southington Fire Department Structure Fire Order of Arrival, 2017–2019

20:00

16:00

12:00

08:00

04:00

00:00

1st Unit 2nd Unit All 90th Percentile 09:18 12:06 10:09

As illustrated by the previous two figures, Southington Fire Department’s ability to assemble the resources required to initiate an interior fire attack are limited by both staffing levels and travel time. Southington may consider increasing apparatus staffing to a minimum of 4 firefighters. This will allow first arriving crews to initiate interior attack and improve the likelihood of positive mitigation outcomes for fire suppression.

Response Reliability Review

The fourth component of service delivery—response reliability—analyzes two areas that can have a significant impact on the ability of the department to respond to calls for service. These two areas of response reliability are workload and call concurrency.

Workload (Unit Hour Utilization)

Workload is a measurement of the amount of work incurred by each crew assigned to a unit. While this may be measured based on the number of incidents to which a unit responds, there is greater value in measuring the amount of time spent on calls by that crew. This measurement of time spent on calls is referred to as unit hour utilization (UHU) and represents the percentage of time a unit is assigned to response activities as compared to the total time the unit was in service.

While there are limited formal performance measures to use as a target measure, in May 2016, Henrico County (VA) Division of Fire published an article after studying their department’s EMS workload.23 As a result of the study, Henrico County Division of Fire developed a general commitment factor scale for their department. The next figure is a summary of the findings as it relates to commitment factors.

Figure 116. Commitment Factors as Developed by Henrico County (VA) Division, 2016

Factor Indication Description

16%-24% Ideal Commitment Range Personnel can maintain training requirements and physical fitness and can consistently achieve response time benchmarks. Units are available to the community more than 75% of the day. 25% System Stress Community availability and unit sustainability are not questioned. First-due units are responding to their assigned community 75% of the time, and response benchmarks are rarely missed. 26%-29% Evaluation Range The community served will experience delayed incident responses. Just under 30% of the day, first-due ambulances are unavailable; thus, neighboring responders will likely exceed goals. 30% “Line in the Sand” Not Sustainable: Commitment Threshold—community has less than a 70% chance of timely emergency service and immediate relief is vital. Personnel assigned to units at or exceeding 0.3 may show signs of fatigue and burnout and may be at increased risk of errors. Required training and physical fitness sessions are not consistently completed.

To track UHU and crew activity rates successfully, crews must be consistently assigned to a unit designation, whether the crew is physically operating a particular piece of equipment or not. Additionally, the software used to track these crews must be capable of consolidating a particular crew in a particular station and calculating the time committed to response as opposed to simply tracking the amount of time that a particular piece of equipment was used, which is accomplished with an hour meter for maintenance purposes. In combination systems, the cross staffing of units is common and without a methodology in place to track crew activity levels, this important metric is difficult to obtain. Southington Fire Department is in the process of transitioning to a new records management system, ESO, that will allow the department to accomplish this task. Currently, the new software is scheduled to go online in early 2022.

23 How Busy Is Busy?; Retrieved from https://www.fireengineering.com/articles/print/volume-169/issue5/departments/fireems/how-busy-is-busy.html

Crews with activity rates greater than 10% will experience a decline when calculating performance because they are responding to less than 90% of incidents within their district. The additional calls for service must then be answered by crews in other districts and these responding crews will have greater travel times than if the unit within its respective zone was available. Additionally, most firefighters must complete monthly training requirements, have ancillary responsibilities, and must also perform daily equipment and facility checks and maintenance. As demands for service for a particular unit increase, the time available for these other tasks diminishes.

Southington Fire Department should continue to collect, monitor, and improve its data collection capabilities, which will allow data quality to increase and enhance their ability to make data driven decisions.

Call Concurrency

Call concurrency is the comparison as to how often multiple calls for service are occurring at the same time. As additional calls for service occur while units are still assigned to other incidents, the ability of the department to respond may be impacted. This is also useful data to consider when working with neighboring agencies to develop mutual aid and automatic aid agreements which may increase the ability to respond to those concurrent calls for service. Even though department resources—including the use of mutual aid and automatic aid agreements—may provide the units to respond, the mere fact that these units may be responding from outside of the primary zone in which the incident is located may result in more lengthy response times.

While there is no specific standard to which Southington Fire Department may be compared, the figure below illustrates the call concurrency over the study period. As illustrated, the vast majority of incidents occur as either a single incident or at the same time as a second incident with only an average of 2.96% of incidents occurring beyond the two concurrent incidents.

Figure 117. Southington Fire Department Call Concurrency 2016–2019

Concurrent Incidents in Progress 2016 2017 2018 2019

Change Over Study Period

Single Incident Two Incidents Three Incidents Four Incidents

85.84% 80.90% 82.37% 82.21% 6.11% 11.95% 15.54% 14.83% 14.54% -23.10% 1.73% 2.86% 2.54% 2.20% -39.70% 0.38% 0.52% 0.26% 0.93% -26.30% Five Incidents 0.10% 0.13% 0.00% 0.13% -26.30% More than Five Incidents 0.00% 0.04% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00%