Calls to critical fires where the first fire engine met our emergency response standard
The emergency response standards for West Sussex were agreed through consultation with the public in 2008. For our 1st appliance our target is 89%. The standards include the additional call handling time for Fire Control Operators to receive 999 calls, gather incident information and mobilise the nearest available fire crews, as well as their travel time.
March 2021 performance
Performance is again strong in Q4 with attendance standards met on 89.1% of occasions. Whilst this reflects a 3.3% reduction from Q3 it does mean that West Sussex Fire and Rescue Service has achieved its emergency response standard for critical fires in all quarters within the financial year, with year end performance of 90.3% being achieved. This is also the fifth consecutive quarter that this target has been achieved. We are maintaining a strong focus on sustained improvements in our retained fire engine availability and our associated projects have led to an 8.7% improvement when compared to Q4 of 2019/20.
The Retained Marginal Gains project continues to make incremental improvements to the availability of our retained fire engines. This is being further supported by a station by station review to identify the specific availability needs of each station, this review will result in a workforce action plan for each of our 23 retained sections.
Reasons for performance
Many factors affect how long it can take us to reach an incident.
- We live and work in a beautiful county, with some areas far from towns and on narrow or even single track lanes.
- Sometimes a caller is not sure of the location, or there is an incomplete address.
- Where we have retained crews, we allow them four minutes to stop what they are doing and travel to their station by car or foot or bike – if it is a busy time of day, they may struggle to get through the traffic to their station, as they aren’t allowed to use lights or horns in their own car and must abide by all the usual rules of the road for a private driver.
- The nearest station may be not available, either due to a lack of crew, or being busy elsewhere. Another crew may have to be sent from a further distance.
- Some times people don’t park with thought and we can’t get through the narrow gaps remaining.
- A level crossing may be down so we need to go a different route if we can.
Actions
The managers in Response investigate every incident where we do not meet our attendance times and these form two key themes that we are all working towards addressing. These are ‘Long travel distances’ and Retained Duty System (RDS)/On call Availability’
The whole of the FRS is focused on increasing RDS availability as when stations are not available our performance is often impacted. West Sussex is predominantly rural and there are areas where we will have difficulty achieving our attendance times due to the distance from a fire station. In these areas we are targeting Prevention work to further reduce demand.
Critical Fire Risk Map
The map below shows our targets for each area.
Emergency Response Standards
Using our fire risk maps we have divided the County into small geographical area, which are allocated a rating of Very High, High, Medium or Low risk, based on the previous incidents of fires, deaths and injuries, predictive risk data, as well as a measure of demographic risk. These are reviewed on an annual basis.
The attendance times are measured from the moment the call is connected to our mobilising centre to the time the fire engine arrives at the incident.