In May 2016, the Home Secretary established a reform programme for the Fire and Rescue Services in England. In July 2017, the Home Office confirmed that Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) changed its name to Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) to reflect its new activities concerning Fire & Rescue Services too. From then, it would take on the role of inspecting fire and rescue services in England, and of assessing and reporting on the effectiveness and efficiency of each service.

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In the summer of 2017, HMICFRS started inspections of England's Fire & Rescue Services in order to assess how well fire and rescue services prevent, protect against and respond to fires and other emergencies, and how well they look after the people who work for the service.

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Now, imagine that HMICFRS inspectors set a date to visit your Fire and Rescue Services within the following months, how prepared are you?

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Although there is no "one-size-fits-all" solution, the implementation of best practices, innovative strategies and the use of technology is proven to be a good way to improve efficiency, effectiveness and workforce well-being.

FireServiceRota can help you to achieve improvements in areas that are currently being evaluated. The following criteria are addressed by our system (the numbers in parenthesis indicate the corresponding criteria in the assessment):

Increase efficiency

• Better use of resources and more thoughtful deployment of assets (2.1.3).
• Achieve savings and avoid residual budget gaps (2.1.2).
• Allocate resources to preventative, protective and response activity 2.1.3).
• Guarantee capacity and capability to achieve both change and operational performance (2.1.5).

FireServiceRota automatically identifies and warns in advance when understaffing will occur. The system suggests the reallocation of supernumerary staff, thus reducing expensive overtime costs. It has comprehensive reporting tools that provide insight into historical and current resource availability, improving transparency and accountability. In addition, the reports provide information about structural understaffing problems allowing informed and targeted recruitment and training efforts.

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Continuous Improvement

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Measure the results of operational activity and use this information to ensure a common understanding of risk (1.1.7) and allow staff to gather information systematically and accurately (1.1.5). Use technology to respond to emergencies and risks (2.2.4).

FireServiceRota supports flexible crewing methods on stations to match the resource requirements. Firefighters can confirm their incident attendance. This provides real-time appliance crewing status information for firefighters, station managers and fire control. Firefighters can update their rota in an automated workflow, saving time and increasing the accuracy of data.

Improve the working lives of fire service employees (3.1.4, 3.3.1, 3.3.2).

• Ensure that the workforce's time is productive, making use of a flexible workforce and flexible working patterns (2.1.5).
• Allow innovation and promote new ways of working (2.2.6).
• Ensure that firefighters stand available at times when risk or demand is greatest (2.1.3).

FireServiceRota supports the crewing model of any fire station. It works with every duty pattern and allows the combining of RDS availability and wholetime shift systems into one consistent crewing overview. Firefighters can easily manage their own rosters wherever they are using innovative mobile applications, smart pagers and GPS location-based services. Firefighters are made aware of imminent crewing deficiencies. The system invites them to adjust their availability or exchange shifts and restore the crewing status.

Collaboration

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Share information with other fire services, enhancing cross border collaboration and visibility of resource status (2.1.6, 2.2.8).

FireServiceRota is interoperable with other fire services, enhancing cross border collaboration and visibility of resource status. Plus: We encourage the sharing of best practices by actively connecting customers with similar needs. Updates for one customer immediately become available to all other customers, saving cost and exposing services to each others´ innovative practices and processes.

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FireServiceRota is able to analyse the information generated in the system and translate it to the statistics HMICFRS requires. Please contact us to get further information about FireServiceRota and how we can help you drive improvements in your station. Our experts will be happy to demonstrate and explain the way our system works.

Phone: +31 613056675

Email: cor@fireservicerota.com