Stats, Stat! Improving Resource Allocation, Recruitment, and Retention in Volunteer EMS Agencies
- 2 minsCollegiate EMS agencies face a variety of common operational challenges, from staffing issues to underwhelming recruitment and retention rates. Low call volumes, high member turnover, and non-targeted recruitment strategies often exacerbate these issues. However, solutions are possible with the aid of an untapped organizational resource: data. Agencies often possess an unrealized amount of information, from trends in patient care reports to commonalities among members.
At the 2018 annual conference of the National Collegiate EMS Foundation in Philadelphia, I presented a lecture which sought to provide statistical solutions to these common problems and ultimately won the Vomacka Student Speaker competition during the conference. During the talk, I overviewed basic statistical analysis which enables agency leaders to effectively recognize members struggling with clinical skills, identify members likely to leave an organization or applicants likely to join the agency, and forecast call volumes to lend quantitative evidence to that well known, anecdotal suspicion that “tonight will be a bad night.” The presentation highlighted the interconnectedness and diverse applications of these easily obtainable metrics, presented the results of these applications at Carnegie Mellon University EMS, identified flaws and methodology improvements, and generalized these approaches to enable audience members to identify their own solutions based on agency-specific priorities and needs.
Learning objectives for audience members included identifying useful and easily obtainable metrics, predicting medical call volume and necessary resources for a small time period with historical, social, and meteorological data, improving recruitment efforts by recognizing populations of students likely or not likely to join a collegiate EMS agency, and maximizing retention rates through early detection of members likely to leave a collegiate EMS agency. The presentation allowed audiences to understand advantages to collecting and analysis historical and operational service and member information, and provided a method for identifying solutions of agency-specific priorities through straightforward analysis of this easily collectable data. Methodology was generalized to allow audience members to identify their own solutions based on agency-specific priorities and needs.
Header image source: The National Collegiate Emergency Medical Service Foundation.
Tom Goode
Data Scientist & EMS Researcher