Performance Indicators for Transition to a Combination Fire Department

VOLUNTEERS CORNER ❘ By EDDIE BUCHANAN

Many fire departments that border major metropolitan areas have already begun some sort of progression into the world of combination fire departments. However, there are many departments around the United States that remain all or primarily volunteer. Recruiting volunteer responders becomes more challenging each day, and it is vital that fire service and local government leaders have reliable benchmarks to drive their investment in career or paid staffing for public safety.

Without such benchmarks, the decision to transition into a combination fire-EMS department and to what degree that transition occurs are based on the opinion of the department leadership and, sometimes, the local government. In worst-case scenarios, a tragic event occurs that calls into question the readiness and capabilities of the fire-EMS department. It should be clarified that many all-volunteer fire departments around the country operate in a highly efficient and professional manner. When a volunteer responder force can meet the needs of a community, then that is undoubtedly the most cost-effective option.

The purpose of this article is to provide some critical organization and performance benchmarks that serve as indicators that an increase in staffing and capability may be warranted. It is to serve as a roadmap for department and community leaders to use to guide them through the transition process when it is warranted. Hiring additional paid firefighters should not be an emotional decision that is hampered by tradition or practice. Such a decision should be based on performance data that is accessible to all primary stakeholders in the decision-making process.

The journey to a combination department may not go directly from volunteer to paid firefighters in one step. With the data points in place that are covered in this article, fire service leaders may migrate through a series of options as growth and service demands impact their communities. The Volunteer/Combination Officer’s Section (VCOS) of the International Association of Fire Chiefs published a guide entitled “Lighting the Path of Evolution—The Red Ribbon Report: Leading the Transition in Volunteer and Combination Fire Departments” in 2005,1 which outlined steps through which a department may evolve over time (Figure 1).The guide offers a variety of staffing options departments may consider as community growth or reduction in volunteer duty hours impacts their ability to meet response goals (VCOS Red Ribbon Report, p. 2). Additionally, the guide outlines indicators for change that may drive such a transition, which include the following:

Community growth.
Community aging.
Missing calls (sometimes known as a “scratch”).
Extended response times.
Reduced staffing.

The Red Ribbon Report provides an excellent roadmap that all fire service and community leaders should have on hand as they consider transitioning from an all-volunteer emergency response force.

Figure 1. Fire Department Progression to a Combination Department

Financial Response Time

When departments wait until the timing “feels right” to seek or request funding for career firefighters, they often find themselves struggling to meet service demands before the newly hired firefighters are in place and ready to run calls. It is essential to recognize that municipal governments work on an annual fiscal cycle. Each year, funding is allocated for the various department needs, and the amount of discretionary funding is very limited. With salary and benefit expenses for entry-level firefighters ranging from $50,000 to beyond $150,000, depending on your location, it is unlikely that departments or local governments can absorb the cost of new personnel in their current fiscal year. Such expenses will need to be added through the formal budget process.

Once approved and funded, the recruitment and training process begins. Advertising, screening, evaluating, interviewing, and selecting candidates can be a months-long process. From there, the training process will begin. Even if you hire prequalified candidates, there will need to be some localized training on procedures and practices. If you are running a recruit school, you can be challenged with an 18-month (or similar) training program before your new hires are ready to run their first call. A familiar timeline for requesting, training, and deploying new career firefighters can be up to two years.

With such an extensive implementation time, chief officers need benchmarks to alert them to staffing and performance challenges long before they reach the crisis level. Early warning signs of performance challenges can prompt operational adjustments that may correct the issue. If those efforts fail, department leaders can begin discussions with their community leaders for additional resources armed with facts that illustrate their needs. With some foresight and luck, they may be able to get additional firefighters in place before an operational crisis occurs.

Organizational Structure

There are some organizational considerations that are critical for success. First, baseline training requirements and credentialing should be in place that are consistent with the community’s needs. Your community needs may require that volunteer members meet state-level credentials consistent with National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 1001, Standard for Professional Fire Fighter Qualifications. In rural areas where the department is the authority having jurisdiction, a less stringent training standard may be adopted, assuming operational tactics are consistent with that training level. For example, a remote community may only provide defensive firefighting capabilities. As such, the training standard may be set to address those tactics. No matter the case, the training standard should be formalized, communicated, and enforced.

Next, minimum staffing levels should be established. These staffing levels should support the level of tactics provided by the department. For general safety, the minimum staffing on a first-out pumper is considered to be two firefighters. This facilitates the safe movement of the apparatus and meets the essential buddy system safety elements. For departments that intend to provide some sort of interior operations, the minimum should be three firefighters, with optimal staffing being four firefighters or better.

As departments consider transitioning to combination departments, they should already have made accountability for crew duty hours a cultural reality in their organization. A department typically defines crews as “available” based on their physical presence in the building. If a firefighter considered to be part of the minimum staffing leaves the premises, the station is considered to be out of service. In remote situations, there may be cases where the department will allow members to respond from a nearby location, assuming they can meet the adopted time targets for response. When such a practice is necessary, it should be accompanied by strong accountability to ensure crew integrity and capability.

Community-driven time targets should be established for emergency response. While performance documents like NFPA 1720, Standard for the Organization and Deployment of Fire Suppression Operations, Emergency Medical Operations and Special Operations to the Public by Volunteer Fire Departments, provide response time components, it is ultimately up to the community, through elected representatives, to determine what “good looks like” related to fire department response in the community. Communities may adopt published industry best practices for response goals or modify/create their own response goals. A standard measure of performance is to arrive on the scene in less than X minutes, XX% of the time. This provides for outliers for calls that may occur in the response district as a result of nontypical, unforeseen factors. Communities may set one response goal for a suburban area of their district and another for rural or remote areas. Whatever the case, the response goals serve as the scale used to measure department performance and ultimately will drive the decision for hiring additional staff.

Specific Unit Dispatch vs. Station Dispatch

How units are arranged in the dispatch CAD is often a controversial part of the transition associated with operating as a combination department. There are two typical approaches to dispatching calls in volunteer settings: station dispatch and specific unit dispatch. With station dispatch, each station is listed in the CAD as always available. The station shows as available in the CAD no matter if qualified staffing is present or not. When a call is dispatched, that station is sent the call, and the dispatcher will typically wait a predetermined amount of time before dispatching the next closest station to fill the place if the first station fails to respond. Such a practice may have worked well in the past, but it can give a false impression of coverage and skew the data measurements necessary to determine true response capabilities. This makes it difficult to determine when qualified personnel are available, which is a crucial data measurement for determining the need to transition to a combination or add additional personnel.

With minimum staffing levels in place, the performance measure becomes available to accurately measure when a station is ready to respond to a call. With this capability, the department may consider switching to a unit dispatch method. Rather than Station 1 marking up as available in the CAD, Engine 1 (a specific unit in that station) is listed as available. This will bring a greater ability to measure response and analyze capabilities and the need for resources. As a rule, the company officer would mark any unit that has staffing available and ready for dispatch through the communications system, each unit having its own minimum staffing requirements. A typical weekday may find only three firefighters available to mark up one engine, while the entire fleet in the station may be marked up on company meeting night. As those personnel leave for the night, those units are marked out of service for calls when they no longer meet minimum staffing levels.

When firefighters are responding from home during a working incident, they simply notify the dispatcher that they have assembled the minimum staffing for that unit by marking en route to the call. The dispatcher can “on-shift” that unit in the CAD and set its status to en route to the appropriate call. When that unit returns to quarters after the call, the crew would notify the dispatcher that they are now out of service or “off-shift” the unit for staffing as they return to their home.

This practice sets the stage for more accurately measuring service coverage. Data can be analyzed related to unit availability, response times, and other time targets determined by the community. It is likely that a combination of response times and unit availability will be used to identify the need for career staffing. Unit availability simply measures the number of hours in a day when the unit was staffed according to minimum standards and ready for service. A common goal for such compliance is 90%. Although 100% coverage is a great goal, situations such as mechanical issues, training, sick time, and so on must be considered. Unit availability is a measure of the baseline of coverage and service for the community. Response time measures how well that base coverage gets to where it needs to go when called. Such a benchmark may indicate the need for additional units or fire stations in the future.

Compliance with Response Goals

With these components in place, the department is ready to accurately measure its performance against its response goals. A standard traffic light dashboard can be established for quick reference on a monthly review basis. When performance starts to diminish by a predetermined rate, stakeholders can examine the deployment method to address any potential localized performance issues or make any minor adjustments in deployment that may correct the issue. Additional benchmark alarms can be set if performance continues to diminish.

A decrease in performance can be from several factors. It may be that call volume is increasing and units are unavailable for the next call when it occurs. Units from other stations may have to respond, causing an increased response time and, thus, having a negative impact on that performance benchmark. The cause may be from lack of staffing, which would have a similar effect. The next-closest station would be dispatched immediately and have to travel a greater distance. A great benefit from the citizen’s perspective is that the dispatcher did not have to wait five minutes before sending the next closest unit. Because the department went through the trauma of adopting minimum staffing levels and specific unit dispatch procedures, the citizen will receive those life-saving services five minutes faster (in this scenario) than they would have before.

Removing the Emotion from the Decision

Transitioning from a volunteer to a combination department can be an emotional event. There is usually extensive personal history and pride (deservingly so) involved when the time finally comes to add career firefighters. Station dispatching and CAD status that is always on for units that are not staffed create tremendous gray areas that make it difficult to understand the condition of the response system until it is too late to respond to a staffing crisis in a thoughtful manner. Although such a configuration may provide some “cover” for the fire chief in the short term, that cover will eventually fade and could potentially result in an unnecessary tragic event.

By improving the structure of the response system to better collect and analyze staffing and response data, the challenge of emergency response is shared between the department, local government, and the community. The community defines the expectation, and the department deploys in the most scientific way possible to leverage its resources toward that goal. When compliance with response goals is no longer possible, it is the community’s responsibility to either modify the goal and expectation or provide the resources necessary to be successful.

Endnote

1. “Lighting the Path of Evolution: The Red Ribbon Report–Leading the Transition in Volunteer and Combination Fire Departments.” Volunteer & Combination Officers Section, International Association of Fire Chiefs (https://www.iafc.org/docs/default-source/1VCOS/vcos_ribbonreportred.pdf?sfvrsn=f64dd40d_0).

W. Edward Buchanan Jr. began his fire service career in 1982 and retired as an assistant chief with Hanover (VA) Fire & EMS. He is a past president of the International Society of Fire Service Instructors and is the 2015 recipient of the Fire Engineering/George D. Post Instructor of the Year Award. He serves on the executive advisory board of Fire Engineering and FDIC International and is the author of Volunteer Training Officer’s Handbook (Fire Engineering). He served on the NFPA Technical Committee on Fire Service Training and the NFPA 1700 Guide for Structural Firefighting Committee. He is a past board member of the Volunteer/Combination Officer’s Section of the International Association of Fire Chiefs and serves on a variety of advisory boards and committees for the fire service industry.