RESPONDING TO RESPONSE TIMES

When we think about timeliness in police, fire and EMS, we often think of response times. And even though it’s recently been pointed out to us that there are other important measures, like timely evidence processing and timely release of information on high-profile events, ultimately response times are the metric you’re most likely to hear about – and the ones that are primarily the difference between safety and tragedy.

For emergency services, particularly, every moment can spell the difference between a minor incident and a crippling injury or a death. To the general public, fast response times are the most tangible evidence that they are getting good service. Just ask anyone who has waited for an emergency vehicle when a relative or friend is having chest pains and shortness of breath.

It’s our guess that most people who read about response times aren’t aware that they can be measured very differently by first responders. Police 1, covers response issues frequently, including an upcoming webinar on “Advancing unified command and communication” on November 4. In one article that was published prior to the pandemic, Police 1 noted that “almost every agency measures ‘response time’ differently.  Some cities use a ‘hello to hello’ standard. This is the time it takes for a dispatcher to pick up the phone (“hello”) and the time it takes the police officer to arrive on scene (“hello”). Other agencies break this time into multiple chunks, such as how long the dispatcher stays on the line, how long the officer is en route to the call, and how long the officer is on scene.

“Where one city might automatically exclude anything over a certain time another city will just include every call sent to their call center. There are probably as many response time definitions as there are police departments across the country.”

These distinctions are important, particularly from the point of view of the person who is urgently in need of help. With a shortage of EMS vehicles in many parts of the country, for example, after the 911 call is finished it can take the dispatcher valuable minutes to actually get an ambulance company to respond to the call. Once that happens, the ambulance still needs to arrive at the scene. From the perspective of the person who made the call, the response time might be 23 minutes for help to arrive, not eight minutes (for the emergency vehicle to make the trip).

If response times are truly to be used as helpful performance measures, we’d argue, that what really matters is the amount of time it takes from reaching 911 until help comes knocking on the door (or kicking it down in extreme instances). Other measures don’t really reflect the customer experience.

Yet another issue with response times is that they don’t take into account the specific situation – and that can jeopardize safety for others, including the responder. If someone thinks they’ve broken an arm, for example, and calls 911 it probably doesn’t matter much if an ambulance arrives in ten minutes or twenty minutes. But if the call is for a fire or a heart attack then every minute counts.

Yet these different scenarios are comingled when response times are published, and used to hold police, fire and EMS accountable for delivering solid service. And that means that when emergency vehicles are summoned, responders who are eager to be seen as effective may respond to the scene as quickly as is possible – traveling far faster than the speed limit, going through stop signs and so on.

No surprise that in 2023 according to the National Safety Council, 198 people “died in crashes involving emergency vehicles. More than half of these deaths were occupants of non-emergency vehicles (57%). Deaths among pedestrians accounted for 23% of the total, while emergency vehicle drivers represented 11%, and emergency vehicle passengers accounted for about 7% of the deaths.”

Our recommendation is that response times, wherever possible, should be disaggregated in such a way as to differentiate between life and death emergencies and those that are far less serious in nature. This would not only make the response time measures more useful – it might save other innocent lives along the way.

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