Standby's - Counted toward your call volume?

[vs-eh?]

Oh, hello...

After some recent discussion with some co-workers regarding call volume and such, I have a question.

Does your service count standby's (to a post, station, street corner, etc...) as a call that is counted toward your annual call volume?

If your service does not, do you feel that it adversely affects funding or gives a false impression of being less busy?

Please include your ballpark annual call volume and what percentage is likely standby's or what the call volume would be if it included standby's.

We have passed 300k for the year and we do not include standby's by giving them a run number. I would say (probably conservatively) that if standby's were included it would be 600k+. That is for a single municiple service FYI.

[DartmouthDave]

Hello,

The old service that I worked for counted stand-by (very small percentage...at most 20 or so per year) and almost anything as a call. The smaller communities (staffed by paid-on-call EMRs) counted anything as a call as well.

The main station had a volume of 5000 for a population of 22,000 people. Plus, around 400 medevacs. One small town cited a 400% increase in calls as a need for a full-time staff in a year without any change in population or overall acuity in the community.

In effect, this skewed call volume and made it difficult to see what we actual did and when. Plus, over time, we lost some cedibility because the numbers we so 'inflated'.

[vs-eh?]

Dave, I didn't see any votes in my poll.

As long as call volume criteria is consistent across the board (province) then I wouldn't have as much issue. This is especially if funding or other EMS related issues are somewhat contingent on "call volume". I am almost certain that basically all other EMS service's outside of mine (in Ontario) include standby's as a "call" and are counted toward call volume. This obviously skews their actual numbers.

[WolfmanHarris]

Here call volume seems consistently broken down by code:

Code 1 (deferrable)

Code 2 (scheduled)

Code 3 (prompt)

Code 4 (urgent)

Code 8 (standby)

Codes 5,6 and 7 are not counted and aren't really used in record keeping anymore. (From what I was told during dispatch rotation)

[crotchitymedic1986]

My services did not count "posting" (at stations or intersections) but did count standbys at emergency scenes (fire/swat) and at PR events (schools, B/P checks).

Does your service count an accident with 4 patients as one case number, or four case numbers ?

[CBEMT]

FT job- event details do not count as runs.

PT- fire standbys count, same run number as the fire trucks. If we go mutual aid for station coverage (rare for the EMS side, but it happens) those count too.

[crazyemt5150]

our company doesn't count posting at street corners and so forth as calls. we are at 90,000 maybe more we wont' break 100,000 but on structure standby's swat, football and other stuff does count damn 300,000 thats alot i thought we were busy

[brentoli]

Are these stand-bys you refer to inter-agency or mutual aid?