Consultant Suggests EMS, Fire Response Changes

The city of Toronto (Canada) should consider integrating its fire and emergency medical operations, reduce the range of medical calls that it attends and improve response times with dynamic staging of equipment, according to a consultant’s report released earlier this month. The firm KPMG performed a Core Services Review of all city agencies, including the fire department and EMS agency, which now operate independently. The report found a decreasing demand for fire emergency services, but increasing demand for EMS services, leaving fire response times the same and increasing EMS response times. KPMG noted that the fire department has twice the budget of EMS, yet the majority of calls for service are for EMS. “Finding the right way to allocate available emergency resources is a major challenge for modern cities,” the report said. “Simply integrating the organizations will not create massive change initially, but it should start the long process to providing more efficient emergency response services,” KPMG concluded. Download (pdf) the section of the report dealing with fire and EMS here.