ACTION REQUESTED:
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Request from the City Manager, Fire Chief and Manager of Emergency Communications for the following:
A. APPROVE and Enter into a Sole Source CONTRACT with FITCH & ASSOCIATES to Perform a DISPATCH & FIRE/EMS OPERATIONAL ASSESSMENT, in an Amount not-to-exceed $50,995.00, and
B. ADOPT an ORDINANCE Amending the City of Peoria 2018-2019 BIENNIAL BUDGET Relating to the General Fund Recognizing the Receipt of $25,498.00 from OSF Hospital and Unity Point Methodist and the Corresponding Expenditure Increase of $25,498.00.
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BACKGROUND: During the 2018-2019 budget discussions, the City Council spent several meetings discussing the resources that the City was allocating to fire and EMS calls. In the first budget report back to the City Council, the following recommendation was made:
The City should work with the PAEMS Medical Director and AMT to determine the efficacy of dispatching the Fire Department of some of the least severe categories. Some calls may not necessitate the response time that a more severe call warrants. A review of this could reduce the risk exposure that the City faces from liability and worker's compensation if a firefighter were injured on a call, or in route to a call.
The City Manager had the opportunity to discuss the challenges of dispatch with Fitch and Associates, a national consulting firm with extensive experience in analyzing dispatch center performance and Fire/ EMS operations. Succinctly, the proposal attempts to answer two specific questions:
Are the right resources going to the right calls?
Are all the resources that are sent appropriate?
In order to answer these questions Fitch will perform two separate but linked analyses:
1) Dispatch review of call taking to understand how the medical priority dispatch product is being utilized, if it is categorizing and prioritizing calls optimally and how the current practice compares to best practice.
2) Fire/EMS deployment operational assessment in order to ...
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