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Follow-Up on Chicago Fire Department Fire and Medical Incident Response Times

March 4, 2015

Summary

The City of Chicago Office of Inspector General has completed a follow-up to its October 2013 audit of the Chicago Fire Department’s fire and medical incident response times.

Executive Summary

The purpose of the 2013 audit was to determine if CFD fire and medical response times met National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) Standard 1710, which CFD historically claimed it met or exceeded.

Our audit found that CFD did not meet the NFPA standard and that CFD’s internal reports lacked the elements necessary to accurately assess whether the Department was in fact meeting or exceeding the national standards as it claimed publicly.

Based upon the results of our audit, we recommended that CFD:

• formally document its response time goals, per NFPA 1710 4.1.2;
• suspend all internal and external reporting that states it is in compliance with NFPA 1710 until such time as it conducts analysis to determine if at least 90% of responses meet the response time goals;
• conduct analysis by ward or community area to determine if its equipment and personnel are positioned appropriately to meet target response times across the city;
• update its policies and procedures to specify the point at which the responding company’s status should be updated either by radio or Fire Mobile Data terminal;
• continuously monitor the number of blank and inaccurate time fields in the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system and work toward achieving 100% completeness and accuracy in all data fields;
• conduct a thorough data-based analysis to identify causes that are preventing it from meeting the national response time goals and ways to improve its operational efficiency;
• create and implement an action plan that will ensure verifiable compliance with NFPA 1710 standards, or conduct a study to determine if the unique characteristics of the city prevent it from meeting the response time goals contained in NFPA 1710 and, based upon that study, choose other response time goals; and
• evaluate turnout and travel time separately from total response time to better identify and understand areas that need improvement as well as to be in compliance with NFPA 1710.

Follow-Up on Chicago Fire Department Fire and Medical Incident Response Times - publication cover