Few elected officials take the time to truly understand how response times impact their communities. The challenge is to convince them that it’s worth their time to learn about how response times really work (a lesson conducted, naturally, by you). To help increase your chances of getting them to listen, you might have to remind them of the risks involved, especially if a high-visibility event occurs in which the response time is not fast enough to meet public expectations.
To a public official, few concepts related to EMS/public safety are as emotionally charged as response times. And with good reason: There’s very little data on the relationship between ambulance response times and patient outcomes, and some studies have even suggested the lack of such an association.
Further complications are common when policymakers mistakenly assume that averages represent a reliable measure of performance. But an average only measures to a 50 percent standard, or half of the time. True response time reliability requires an agency to arrive at the scene of an emergency in an agreed-upon interval (such as 8 minutes and 59 seconds), with agreed-upon compliance (such as 90 percent of the time).
The reason response times should be a public policy decision is economic: Maintaining faster response times takes additional resources, and resources cost money. In the end, your city council or other governing body has to decide whether it’s worth the investment to have faster responses. If they desire faster response times but are unwilling to pay for that level of service, they’re effectively making the decision that the benefit isn’t worth the expense. Or they’re hoping nothing really bad happens.
Although some people view response times purely in a clinical light, that’s only part of the picture. Response times are a customer service issue as much as they’re a clinical one. If you don’t believe that, you’ve never stood over your unconscious 4-year-old child while waiting desperately for help to arrive—in a situation like this, no response time is “fast enough.” In other words, the public has a well-founded expectation that help will arrive quickly in an emergency.
That, more than anything else, is what makes response times a matter of public policy. And, perhaps, what will convince your council members to invest the time and energy to understand the concept.
