Providing "House coverage"

DrParasite

DrParasite

The fire extinguisher is not just for show
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In the fire service, when an area/district/town/whatever has a major incident/ fire, extended ops, etc, they will backfill their firehouses with mutual aid companies.

Do any EMS agencies do that? I don't mean SSM units within your company, but rather do you know of any agencies that will proactively request a mutual aid ambulance to respond to their quarters to provide coverage when they have no staffed units available to respond to their primary area, until one of their units becomes available?
 
Northern Virginia and border counties of MD have a liberal mutual aid agreement. Some counties take more than they give. For example, I regularly run into Loudon County with our ambulance, and occasionally fill one of their stations. Prince George's County also uses us often for EMS station fills. These counties rarely, if at all fill our stations or run calls in our county. These counties have a rather large volunteer component, so their staffing and deployment is often far less than optimal.

Alexandria and Arlington run a lot of our calls, and we also run a lot of theirs, so it's more of an even exchange, as it should be. Basically, we have AVL, so it's the closest unit to the call regardless of which county the ambulance comes from. We don't have the problem of a bunch of little volunteer fiefdoms like you would see in New Jersey for example, who can be honeybadgers when it comes to mutual aid requests.
 
That happens where I am. Pretty much all the counties have some sort of mutual aid with adjacent counties. This is for EMS and fire.
 
DrParasite said:
In the fire service, when an area/district/town/whatever has a major incident/ fire, extended ops, etc, they will backfill their firehouses with mutual aid companies.

Do any EMS agencies do that? I don't mean SSM units within your company, but rather do you know of any agencies that will proactively request a mutual aid ambulance to respond to their quarters to provide coverage when they have no staffed units available to respond to their primary area, until one of their units becomes available?
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We routinely cover neighboring counties during busy hours. Supervisor on duty asks the dispatchers to contact the neighboring counties for a truck to come on standby. Whomever will hang out or run calls from the county line (or in the county when its really busy).

In one of my counties we even get mutual aid from the neighboring State on occasion. Last time was during a funeral for a county medic, SC's Horry County sent us 2 units I believe.
 
Monmouth County has a mutual aid response plan up to fifth alarm for ambulance and rescues for any area in the county. Every squad it's familiar with their coverage and who covers them
 
Our Dispatch is pretty good about getting units to clear when we are getting close to low levels. We are also a private that runs 911/IFT so there are always trucks available to get pulled in for coverage.

The only time I have seen out of county units running calls was for an MCI with 40+ Pts.
 
In South Jersey at the MICU project I worked, we'd sometimes do this haphazardly - as in, there was no policy, but if most of the medic unite were out we'd offer to go to a central location to shorten a potential response to other areas.

I don't really like the idea of corner posting, but I do think there needs to be a dynamic nature to response such as moving closer to an area that has a unit on a call. I think an ideal would be to work out deals with fire companies, PDs, etc. so that a medic unit could relocate for a short period of time so that the crew could have bathroom and computer access for charting.
 
When I volunteered on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Kent and Queen Anne's counties were actually pretty good with shuffling units around, despite Kent having all volunteer transport.
Queen Anne's Dispatch rotates their ALS ambulances around between stations several times a day, depending on which units are busy.
 
I see in station coverage for busy districts within the same agency a lot, but not with mutual aid partners. I think part of this stems from the fact that many agencies don't have ambulances to spare to cover other areas, but they do maintain the fire apparatus and staffing to do so. A neighboring town will send an engine to cover if their is a significant incident in town, but they won't send an ambulance since all of the departments only have one, maybe two hard staffed ambulances. They will still respond mutual aid, but from their own quarters.
 
Mutual aid

We respond to calls outside of our jurisdiction when requested. We responded to a real tough vehicle extrication when the on scene firefighters were unsure as to how to extricate the pt , our fire dept.requested aid when we had a pick-up truck carrying 17 illegal immigrants roll over 5 times on the interstate. We called in 6 ambulances and 3 helicopters for that one.

Ps having taken CE at the Firehouse Expo in San Diego over the years has directly helped on both these incidents. The university of extrication course and a lecture on START triage were invaluable . Take a lot of CE whenever you can.
It is time well spent.
 
I think some people are misunderstanding what I mean for house coverage. I know mutual aid can be both given and received when a call is pending.

however, if you have 2-4 ambulances that are on calls, will you request an outside ambulance to respond to your quarters (when no calls are pending for your area) to cover their primary area just in case a call comes in?
 
DrParasite said:
I think some people are misunderstanding what I mean for house coverage. I know mutual aid can be both given and received when a call is pending.

however, if you have 2-4 ambulances that are on calls, will you request an outside ambulance to respond to your quarters (when no calls are pending for your area) to cover their primary area just in case a call comes in?
Click to expand...

In effect Yes, except usually they wait until they are holding Alpha/Omega calls and all 8-10 trucks are on calls.
 
Curious if the agreements are for a set term or for a long period -- like do you come up with a mutual aid agreement yearly, etc.?
(Hmm...would like to see some game theory applications here...most interesting!)
 
DrParasite said:
I think some people are misunderstanding what I mean for house coverage. I know mutual aid can be both given and received when a call is pending.

however, if you have 2-4 ambulances that are on calls, will you request an outside ambulance to respond to your quarters (when no calls are pending for your area) to cover their primary area just in case a call comes in?
Click to expand...

My agency does exactly this. We're a combined paid professional/ volly service. We have 4 ambulances and do the town 911 and the local hospital's IFT, both BLS and CCT, to the tune of about 6,200 a year. When we have a big prolonged event or an exceptionally busy period we tone out a neighboring volly service to cover our building.

When this happens we usually already have one or 2 MA trucks on calls in town.

Some of our officers prefer to have these MA companies "Cover the line" which just sounds mean to me, since we have nothing but trees on our borders.
 
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