There has been a lot of effort and ingenuity applied toward reducing response times lately. The largest part of it has been directed toward ambulances, naturally. People are more concerned with getting help on hand for people than they are for buildings. But in many places fire response is high on the list too. It just doesn’t grab the publicity as much, unless there is a remarkable event involved in one.
Excessive response times are usually caused by: a) too great a distance to travel, b) not enough units in service for the demand, or c) traffic conditions preventing a timely response.
Here in North America our efforts to improve response times usually involve adding more ambulances and EMT’s so that there is no delay in getting a unit started. That pretty well works for us right now because the economy is strong and buying another ambulance isn’t much of a problem, as long as you have enough people who want to be trained as medics to ride the things.
And that is where we are starting to fail. As the metropolitan areas expand we are seeing a heavy migration into “exurbia” filling in rural areas that are miles away from any sort of ambulance stations. Or in the case of small towns and cities, sudden influxes of new residents that overwhelm the existing emergency squads.
We’ve been seeing several innovative solutions tried in a lot of different countries to address these three forms of shortcomings. Some places are trying to get around the traffic issue by sending out an advance force on motorcycles. Last week we reported on an ambitious plan in the Republic of Georgia to have constantly roving response cars in an attempt to have help on hand in two minutes after dispatch.
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Filling in remote areas with new stations isn’t too hard a task. A few thousand for a Butler™ building and a used ambulance will get you in business in no time.
But getting new medics to fill the seats….that is the problem everywhere. Many places are just plain running out of people who have the desire to do that kind of work. In New Zealand the one-man ambulance is the norm in a large part of the country. And a few weeks ago we pointed out HERE at Firegeezer how the “volunteer” focus in some areas is directed to making things nice for other people to do the work.
Firegeezer believes that we need to start directing our efforts toward developing new applicants for emergency medical training. Expose younger people to the opportunities and satisfaction of ambulance work, be it paid or volunteer.
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I’ll get into some possible solutions later this week. But now we need to get this equipment checked out. I’ll go start the coffee.
Happy Birthday, Dad !
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