Monday, February 6, 2012

Non-Deployment Plan Comments

Please use this post to share non-deployment plan comments about the fire department or any other aspect of your job.  Thanks again for keeping us safe.

6 comments:

  1. It is clearly obvious that the actions of our organization is completely out of sync with our Mission statement. Closing resources from the new deployment plan and using limited existing resources to answer non-emergency calls counters our efforts to "preserve life & property". For the civilians reading this blog, your fire department is guided more by the fear of litigation, than to answering true emergencies. To keep you informed, when one calls "911", regardless of the complaint (blister on heel, need my medical prescription filled, "feel sleepy after taking sleeping pills", or I want to be seen faster in the ER and skip the waiting room) the LAFD is obligated to transport all of these people to emergency rooms. Every day ambulances, or Rescues as we call them, are taken out of the emergency system and are left often waiting in the halls of packed emergency rooms. The areas where these precious ambulances(Rescues) serve, are now abandoned until the ambulance returns back to their district or an available neighboring ambulance covers the empty districts. This is why some 911 response times take much longer than others. Not to scare you, but you just hope that if you're having a true life-threatening emergency, your locally assigned ambulance isn't waiting in an ER hallway; otherwise, there will be a delay. It is almost impossible to put a value on time sensitive irreversible heart or brain tissue death. Most citizens are unable to feel the effects of the downsizing of the Fire Department until they have an emergency. And if that emergency does come, it is difficult due to the stress of the incident to notice the effects of our delays. We see it because we are professionals, the physicians and nurses see the watered down nature of emergencies because they now work in overcrowded conditions (i.e., Kaiser nurse are currently on strike). The emergency rooms are slammed with patients who don't need to be there and those true emergency patients who do come to the ERs are given limited attention due to the overcrowding. The system is on the brink of collapse, which is demonstrated by recent ER closures (Century City, Daniel Freeman, MLK) and by medical insurance costs.

    The bottom line is we need reform and it needs to come from the informed residents of the City of Los Angeles. Firefighters can only show you the plagued, antiquated, and at-risk system. The leaders of our organization (chiefs) have to appease our Mayor who has to appease the city council members, who turn to you, the citizen, and measure what you're complaining about most. So before an emergency happens to you, get informed and contact you council member and ask questions. Ask if your Fire Department answers non-emergency calls? Ask if response times are delayed to true emergency calls due to ambulances already committed to non-emergency calls? The solution is two fold: first, for the 911 system to stop dispatching the limited resources to non-emergency type calls and second, for the city council to reinstate the resources that were recently cut due to unequal budget cuts.
    Thanks for reading.

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  2. What is really sad is we have addressed some of the problems(and there are plenty more)but the people making all these decisions are all sitting on the 18th floor, and haven't be in the field in years riding a Engine, Truck or Rescue, and are clue less, and call our EMS system what it really is for alot of the people out there,its the(LAFD Health Care Plan)...we have this champagne standard, on a beer budget

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  3. A word of caution to the citizens who do call their representatives. Ask the questions about closures and delays, then RESEARCH the answers you are given. At a local meeting, I witnessed a Chief Office tell the citizens "We are not taking your Engine, it will remain there". What he failed to state was that there was NO ONE TO STAFF IT! Misrepresentation is what that is, and the Chiefs are intentionally misrepresenting the facts of delays and effects of this "new model". The reality is there are far less field resources available to cover an ever increasing call load, not to mention the increased down time of the Rescues being tied up at the Emergency Room waiting on a bed Paramedic Rescues (Advance Life Support) are regularly tied up with Basic Life Support (BLS) calls due to the closure of other BLS Rescues. Brain death starts in 3-5 minutes and regular delays of this time and more are common. Do your research, ask your representative, visit the local fire station and be weary of what the Department WANTS you to believe.

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  4. Until someone develops self-operating trucks/engines/RAs and some way to have the trucks put out fires and take care of the injured, "Ready Reserve" isn't fooling anyone.

    We are not going to ask our representatives. We plan to tell them. We have secured and analyzed all raw incident data since 2007. This includes full deployment, MCP and the new deployment plan. The facts speak for themselves.

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  5. How, when and where will this true and accurate stat's be presented? It would be nice to have numbers to back up what every member in the field KNOWS is happening. A comparison of the "Chiefs to Silver" ratio, and how this department compares nationwide to similar departments would also help. I have a previous study from before the modification plan that show how understaffed we were before compared to New York, Dallas, Chicago, etc. With our reductions, I can only imagine what new numbers would look like. If you eliminated the HUGE amount of non-workers (Gold), the amount of field workers for a city of what, 5 million, swelling to 7+ million on weekdays? Last major earthquake in 1994? Were due. Terrorist attack? When, where and how bad are the only variables. What do we have, 500 daily field positions including Chiefs? Any more cuts and we will be playing Russian Roullet with a Semi-Automatic.

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  6. A word of caution to the members. YOUR social media, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is being watched! This is a fact. Before you post ANYTHING, consider how it is going to come back and bite you. Do NOT get lulled into a false sense of security that just because you have not "friended" PSD that they can not see and view your pictures and comments. Once written or posted, there is a "memory" and you have NO security in erasing something or even shutting down your account. Before you post or type ANYTHING, consider how it is going to look on the nightly news.

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Leave as many or as few details as you feel comfortable providing. Optimally: Station, date, incident description and how the new deployment plan impacted the incident. All comments are moderated. All comments are anonymous.