Response times, Dispatching, & Station Alerts

[firefighter36 52]

Over the past few years, I have noticed that my department's response times have been extended by as much as 4 minutes from the time of the initial call until the first arrival on scene. This doesn't have to do with staffung, or where we are responding to, but rather the way in which we are dispatched. Up here in Dutchess, we have a county dispatch center, who take calls and dispatch appropriate resources. The old computer system triggered a station pre-alert and printed a run ticket as soon as the alarm was initially entered by the dispatcher. The call was then toned out over the radio (by priority if there were multiple alarms holding.) We have pagers, plectrons in the station, portable radios, etc.

My concern is, with the New World Systems Software that Dutchess is now using, there is no pre-alert, and it seems as though there are no plans to engineer a new one. From reading run rickets when I am on duty, I see that there can be as much as a 2-5 minute delay between when the alarm is entered by the call taker and notification of the alarm from the 911 center. We have no problem making it from the station to the scene in under 6 minutes at our time of dispatch, but we lose a very valuable couple of minutes off the front end of the call. Furthermore, I discussed this with a member of our county Fire Advisory Board, who explained to me that the pagers at their fire company go off the same time whether they are at home or at a meeting. There wasn't much understanding of the delay between the initial call and the initial dispatch, since this person's station is not manned 24/7, nor do they have a computer link to DC-911.

I know that every county has a different system, and even different departments have different equipment. What does everyone's station have? Do any other departments have any kind of pre-alerting system? What is your department's average time between Initial call and Dispatch of the run? More importantly, what does everyone think of the time we lose not having such a system anymore?

Edited January 12, 2008 by mbendel36

[Guest]

NFPA has a standard on communications which may be helpful to you. And, ISO uses this standard if that is important to your town.

New Canaan's PSAP is the PD. All 911 calls get answered by the PD dispatcher. Fire and EMS calls then get transferred to Southwest CMed which is our fire and EMS dispatch. This is a single button function and the PD dispatcher can remain on the line after the transfer is made. The CMed dispatcher speaks to the caller, enters the information into the CAD and then tones us out. They track this time for QA purposes and I do not know of any time when that entire process took longer than one minute. They also send out a cell phone text message.

[jcoppola 52]

Chief,

What happened to the idea of dispatching New Canaan out of Norwalk's new combined Emergency Communications Center at NPDHQ? Also, Southwest CMED was rumored to be looking at our dispatch center for their new location...any thoughts?

Joe C.

[AFS1970 504]

I have had the benefit of traveling a few years ago and seeing a fair amount of dispatch centers around the country. pretty much they all seem to work the same way, the call comes into the center, the information is entered on to a computer or a paper form, the response is looked up, and the call is dispatched.

Several factors can delay this process and some of those factors are never tracked. In a case with multiple PSAP's like New Canaan, a call comes into one center and is transfered to another, this is a fairly quick process but can take time depending on call volume at either end. This is the way allot of EMS agencies get their calls.

Once the call is answered in the dispatch agency, there can be a wide variable of processing time depaending on call type/priority, call volume, and even dispatcher skill (some of us don't type as fast as others). There may be problems with the caller, either hard to understand or hard to get actual information from. Often it takes several tries to get the location of the incident out of them.

As for looking the response up, this can be manual on a card system or automatic on a computer, but there are also delay factors, if one excedes what was planned for. Years ago when setting up run cards in Stamford, one of the fire departments did not provide anyone past 2nd due on the cards, because they weren't planning on a 3rd alarm. This is exactly when we don't need to be calling the IC on one fire and ask him what he wants on another fire, so not having a ready resource can delay it while a better answer is figured out. Thankfully we fixed this problem in 1999 when setting up the new CAD system, but there are still times when lack of resources leads one to come up with non traditional dispatches.

As for pre-alerts there is little easy way to do this except for the first due company, and if you think about it the times we really need to speed up dispatching is when the second and third due are now comming in first due. I did hear about a career department somewhere in the mid west (I don't remember where), that the dispatchers would just say over the radio "Pre Alert for [Address] and give the street address, not even the nature of the call. They would not even alert the stations at this step, but that way units in the field or anyone listening to the radio would know a call was comming in. Then the responding stations were alerted and the full announcement was made. While this is a neat idea, I think it could actually add to any delays by adding an extra step into the process.

[Guest BFD196]

Joe, according to my partner up here we were looking into moving back down to Norwalk a while ago but they decided to stay here in Bridgeport.

As for pre-alerts, when we dispatch New Canaan we always give a quick announcment with the location and type of incident, "New Canaan Fire Standby, 3 Farm Road, Fire Alarm." I dont know if this helps everyone get out the door faster, but it takes only seconds and, as was said above, if units are on the road they can start heading that way immediatly. I try to keep the time between recieving the call and dispatching about 2 minutes for EMS and usually one for fire. If I'm having trouble with the caller, or I need to stay on the phone and get more information I'll dispatch during the call, or have my partner send it out.

[firefighter36 52]

Got the explanation about this that I was looking for. Thank you. EMTBravo, can we close this topic?