Oral report
Minutes:
For the benefit of new Members, Sarah Wilson, Head of North West Fire Control (NWFC) introduced herself and Ged Basson, Operations Manager, NWFC.
Mrs Wilson provided the following update including what had been done since the last meeting to try and improve workflow and speed of response.
· It was noted that Ged Basson was Lancashire’s single point of contact. Work was ongoing to look at the differences between the different Fire and Rescue Services whose calls were handled by NWFC (namely, Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Cumbria and Cheshire);
· Some operational stages to mobilise including some pre-mobilising actions had now been removed;
· Research was currently being undertaken to determine whether the implementation of pre-alerting would improve response times (this enabled resources to be alerted as soon as a caller’s location was known);
· Facilities for control room operators had been improved including changes to the intercom facility, the addition of a request for assistance function and amendments to call management prompts which enabled operators to pause mid-process to make mobilisation earlier;
· The address gazetteer was currently used by other agencies and contained a lot of address information not required (such as: fallow land, grazing land, orchards, ponds, advertising hoardings etc). The gazetteer was currently in the process of being updated. Once this was complete unwanted addresses would be filtered and removed;
· Mr Basson was also the line manager of 2 teams and there was a focus on individual staff performance. He was working on a computer programme that would look at: each fire and rescue service, incident type, staff performance and team performance to identify best practice and make improvements.
Mrs Wilson advised that at the end of September it would be possible to see if these improvements had had any effect.
In response to a question from County Councillor Holgate regarding staff turnover, Mrs Wilson confirmed that staff retention had been an issue. Five new control operators were starting on 25 September 2017. Currently staff in development who were working towards competency was at 60%. Retention was not however seen to be problematic as new people brought new life experiences. Exit interviews were also conducted and reasons for leaving were valid. The majority of reasons were to pursue careers such as ambulance technicians and firefighters now these agencies were recruiting and feedback included that the experience of working at NWFC had enhanced their skills for interview.
In response to a question raised by County Councillor Clarke, Mrs Wilson confirmed she did not believe local knowledge had been lost with the move to NWFC. Not every operative who worked in Lancashire knew all the locations but the knowledge of how Lancashire operated was important. Teams were structured to include staff with different geographical knowledge, skills and experience. Mrs Wilson advised that in terms of location identification, NWFC now had an Enhanced Information Service for Emergency Calls (EISEC) which enhanced information for emergency calls by cross referencing the telephone number to an address in a database which enabled the operators to see on a map where the caller was ringing from which enabled the incident to be located more accurately. Previously Lancashire had a separate location system whereas NWFC used an ordinance survey gazetteer which could also be used to identify a location from land marks.
In response to a question raised by Councillor Smith regarding facilities to translate other languages, Mrs Wilson confirmed that Language Line was subscribed to. This was a facility whereby a caller could be transferred to an interpreter. NWFC also had a number of staff who could speak different languages.
In response to a question raised by County Councillor Tomlinson regarding whether the target was appropriate Assistant Chief Fire Officer Russel advised that when the control room was established 3 years ago LFRS had tried to use the same performance standards and had tried to compare data that was not comparable. Assistant Chief Fire Officer Russel had undertaken a review which he had been presented to the Planning Committee meeting held 17 July 2017 which aimed at providing a more simplified approach, specifically measuring the Service on its end-to-end performance; how quickly the Service mobilised fire engines to incidents set against its Emergency Response Standards. Revised Key Performance Indicators were approved for KPI 2, Responding to Emergencies, for the removal of KPI 1.7 High / Very High Risk Home Fire Safety Checks and a replacement of this with Home Fire Safety Checks (which would move to Safe and Well Visit’s during performance year 2018/19). The details of these new KPIs were presented in the Performance Management Information later on the agenda.
RESOLVED: - That the report be noted.