How Is Peak Load Staffing, Unit Hour Utilization and System Status Management Used in the Fire Service and Ambulance.

The legal age of non EMS/Fire think hatful believe that the EMS and Fire bellyaches be sporadic. In reality in that respect is a predictable trend where the call chromas atomic number 18 higher and lower. there argon 3 concepts that I will discuss further, first, System placement Management. SSM is solely what its name implies, the management of a EMS/Fire systems resources before and between calls. It is the process of preparing the system for the best possible solvent to the future(a) EMS or Fire call. Second, the concept is of Unit-Hour Utilization. UHU is an equation to find let on what percent of the measure a specific social social building block is being employ on a specific daylight.Third, Peak Load Staffing will be discussed. PLS is a pretty simple topic to understand, For instance, Industrial areas and commercial stance building usually assume the highest call volume during the 9am-5pm business day when residential areas get hold of a higher call volum e aft(prenominal) 5pm, lessen at night and start again around 6am the next day. The concept of PLS is to have more resources in the higher call volume times and areas. I deed as a Paramedic for the medical examination Express Ambulance Service (Medex) where both SSM and PLS are used. First, the concept of System situation Management.Our 2 most northern posts at Medex are Swedish agreement infirmary (northeastern chicago) and Resurrection Medical Center (northwest chicago). The dispatchers attempt to keep 2 amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and 3 BLS ambulances around the hospital. except if all of our ambulances out of Swedish Cov. Hospital get dispatched, Our dispatchers will move a few ambulances from Resurrection over to Swedish Cov. to cover the area and decrease overall response times. There have been times where we have not been relocated to either hospital and had to exit more than 30-45 minutes lights and sirens to get to a patient.If SSM had been utilize appropriately, that response time could have been greatly decreased. UHU, or unit hour utilization, itself is fairly straightforward. Its reckon by dividing the number of transports by the number of unit hours, with one unit hour defined as a fully equipped and staffed fomite in your EMS system. If your system has 10 ambulances around the clock, there are 240 unit hours in a 24-hour period. If those 10 ambulances do 120 transports in 24 hours, you would calculate your systems UHU as follows120 transports/240 unit hours = . 5 UHU (http//www. ems1. om/ems-management/articles/1365144-How-to-explain-UHU-from- UFOs-to-your-city-manager/) Back to face-to-face experience at Medex for the implementation of PLS. On average, our Medical calls on the hebdomad days are nearly double that of which we get on the weekend. In addition, the number of calls during the day is cut in half at night. On average, I run 6 medical calls per 12 hour sack on a week day, 3 at night and 3 on the weekend. If you look at tho se numbers, if you were to staff the same amount of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and BLS ambulances on the weekend or at night as you did during the day, the UHU dimension would be extremely low.On average, Medex has around 12 ALS and 24 BLS ambulances on the street during the week. For the weekend, they only have 6 ALS and 10 BLS ambulances on the street. This effectively withers the running cost for the company but does not birdsong the line staff. The EMS and Ambulance companies utilize these three concepts quite effectively, however they substructure as well as be applied to municipal Fire/Rescue departments. Most people see the Fire Departments as a rigid system, The stations are where you sit. However this does not always cover the most amount of area.For instance, township ABC has 2 fire stations both on the main road in town 5 miles apart. Both have 2 ambulances at each station, If both ambulances at one of the stations go our on a call. One of the towns regions arou nd the station would experience a long ETA for an ambulance. However if one of the 2 ambulances sitting at the another(prenominal) station would go and cover the empty station until a unit cleared from a call, the ETAs would be greatly reduced. This system is partially utilise with the station coverage neighboring departments participate in.The concept of UHU would be use in the Fire service more for evaluation purposes. This can uphold identify if addition resources are required, which units are near operational limits and which units are not utilized to their potential. Finally PLS is a topic which is not very much used in the Fire service. This if properly implemented can reduce line staff strain, more adequately cover the areas required and come through money. For instance, a town like Rosemont is primarily commercial business that are open 9-5 with very little residence on off hours and weekends. The majority of their Fires are 9-5 weekdays.To have more staff on art duri ng those hours would simply make more sense and save the town money. The Ambulance services have less complications than the Fire services does implementing the above concepts. The Fire service provides a larger spectrum of services and has many different apparatus for different uses. In the ambulance service they only have ALS and BLS ambulances which can sometimes work for eachother. For instance, a ALS ambulance can run a BLS call easily. However in the Fire service, a ALS ambulance cannot have the firefighting capabilities of a truck or Engine crew.In addition, Ambulance companies have a plethora of resources that they can call on, to get another ambulance on the street is easy as art a few people in since they have many pointless ambulance that can be deployed if demand. The largest problem with the Firefighting side of this concept being implemented is that fires, sizes and resources needed truly is a sporadic event. Yes you can predict in the winter there will be more fir es but the resources needed to combat a fire cannot be predicted as accurately.The UHU is extremely versatile as is the ability to effectively implement PLS on Fire Apparatus. For the quaternate of july scenario shows the utilization of Peak Load Staffing by having more resources on duty for events and days shown to require more resources. City XYZ FD is using System office Management to cover the high call volume areas between the hours required. The nett example uses Unit Hour Utilization to most effectively set apart the resources. The three above concepts of properly applied to the fire service can greatly reduce strain on the staff and running costs.