Emergency Service Optimisation

Emergency services benefits from ACTIVE solutions

With increasing pressure on emergency services to meet performance and efficiency targets regarding response times and productivity, ACTIVE has seen a considerable rise in the amount of fire and ambulance service clients now using their workload modelling solutions.

The recent Audit Commission, 'Rising to the Challenge' report favourably commented on ACTIVE clients Cleveland, Merseyside and Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service due to their ability to reduce costs without increasing risk to the public. These fire services are three out of only five that achieved efficiency savings of above 15% of their overall expenditure.

Mark Gallagher, Fire Cover Officer, Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service comments, "In 2004, to supplement our existing suite of tools we commissioned ACTIVE to develop a workload modelling system. Since then the Phoenix workload model has played a major part in our total cost savings through identifying efficient shift patterns and individual appliances that can be stood down, without impacting on our service delivery to the public."

Using ACTIVE software, services are able to better identify areas of high risk and consequently better equip these areas with essential resources as necessary. ACTIVE Phoenix is a fast and easy to use system which hypothetically analyses workloads placed on operational resources for any deployment scenario and then measures them against increased efficiency and reduced risk.

With the capability to run a range of deployment scenarios in seconds, Phoenix will save services months of time. Fire services can model the impact of changing crewing, adding or removing appliances, the impact of responding from alternative locations and changing response standards. These questions can be asked in a risk-free environment, giving managers the confidence to make critical decisions and plan for the future.

Phoenix is complementary to the FSEC toolkit and offers a fast second opinion that provides a sound evidence base for key decisions which have to be made by senior managers.

Equally ambulance services are increasingly looking at what resources are needed and where and when to deploy them. Aligning operational response capacity with demand for the service will ensure economic, efficient and effective use of resources and lead to the best patient outcome. By using ACTIVE software, ambulance services will benefit from the ability to determine locations where ambulances should be placed for short periods of time in order to be close to the predicted demand.

Assessing the right level of resource and optimising shift and rota configuration requires extensive modelling of the demand and supply side of an ambulance service. Once completed however, resource planning will be an essential component in the sustained delivery of an excellent ambulance service.

There are four distinct components to effective ambulance service resource planning optimised deployment planning, optimised shift pattern configuration, optimised rota options and optimised resource level requirements/impact analysis. By combining these components in Phoenix, ambulance services can benefit from a range of options available for service delivery improvements.

ACTIVE continue to work with Ambulance and Fire services alike looking to make their planning more effective. 50% of fire services and 80% of ambulance services are now ACTIVE clients.