Response time dissected

An important issue on my plate these days is a plan to improve Lincoln Fire & Rescue's ability to respond to life-threatening emergencies. We believe that by building four new fire stations, then repositioning our existing personnel and apparatus to those stations (while abandoning others) we can significantly improve travel time to places that are more than four minutes away from a fire station.

Travel time, however, is not the same thing as response time. Rather, it is but one component. When you dissect response time, it can be divided into three basic components: call processing time, turnout time, and travel time. I am going to write a series of posts this week to describe each of these, beginning today with call processing.

Call processing time is the interval from when the emergency call is placed to when a dispatcher notifies the emergency responders. A lot of stuff has to happen during that period: the ringing phone must be answered, the call-taker must gather and/or confirm basic information (address, nature of the emergency, level of consciousness, breathing status, etc.). Sometimes the caller must be calmed or reassured in order to gather this critical information.

In all but the smallest public safety answering points (PSAPs, commonly known as 911 Centers), the call processing is split between call-takers who handle the telephones, and dispatchers who handle the radio. Once the call-taker concludes that the event is emergent, he or she forwards it to a dispatch position. After the call has been forwarded for dispatch, the call-taker usually continues to gather and forward supplementary information, and provide instructions and assistance to the caller.

Meanwhile, the event has landed in the dispatch queue, the database of pending calls awaiting dispatch. Computer-aided dispatch software helps dispatchers deal with those queues by assigning priority rankings and colors to pending calls, and by recommending the appropriate response units based on pre-designed criteria. Nonetheless, the dispatcher must conclude any current dispatch, read and absorb the contents of the pending call in the queue, recognize it as emergent, check the availability and status of the recommended units, key the mic and get the attention of the resource to be assigned, and voice the pertinent incident details. While much of this same information is also sent electronically to a mobile data computer in the response vehicles, the voice dispatch and confirmation is still a crucial step.

All of this takes time. Even when the call processing steps proceed smoothly and quickly, those small periods of a few seconds add up. Multiple emergencies often exist at the same time, requiring call-takers, dispatchers, and responders all to multitask efficiently. Ideally we'd like to get 90% of all critical incidents dispatched within 60 seconds from the time the 911 line first rings. This doesn't mean that we will be done with the call in 60 seconds, only that we have determined that an emergency exists, forwarded the essential information to a dispatch position, and notified the assigned units to respond.