Wisconsin Department Works Hard for Accreditation

In a profession where lives are on the line, Wauwatosa Fire Department officials say data often trumps intuition when ensuring that day-to-day operations run smoothly.

The fire department was accredited Aug. 27 by the Center for Public Safety Excellence, a nonprofit organization that promotes the improvement of fire and emergency services.

Fire Chief Rob Ugaste said since the accreditation process began in 2011 the department has learned to use data analytics as a way to track how daily duties measure up.

“If you ask any fire chief, ‘Do you have a good fire department?’ he says ‘sure,’ “Ugaste said. “When you ask him to prove it, they don’t know what to say.”

Ugaste Accreditation is a comprehensive assessment – a report card – that evaluates the levels and quality of services a fire department provides its citizens, Ugaste said. It’s a means to prove the department is doing a good job in areas like response time, business practices and training records, among other things.

Using Data on the Job

The department wasn’t always data-driven, said Ugaste, who added he was hired as chief in 2011 at a time when the city was looking to hire a department leader with accreditation experience. Ugaste said he’s been through the rigorous accreditation process before during his previous position as second-in-command at a fire department in Illinois.

“We were doing everything by history, by experience and by gut instinct,” he said of how the department operated before the accreditation process began. “That’s all changed now. We’re data driven. Everything is about the data and what it says.”

The chief used response times as an example for how data can improve performance. For example, data can calculate the time taken by the call handling process managed by emergency dispatch, the amount of time it takes for dispatch to alert the fire department of an emergency, and the amount of time it takes for crews to arrive on the scene.

If data shows things are slower than they should be, the department can re-evaluate how tasks are completed, he said.

“This process has forced us to become a better organization,” Ugaste said. “It’s forced us to become data-driven, it’s forced us to do things in a way that we can now document how we’re doing it, whey we do it.”

Improving Professionalism

From start to finish, the accreditation process took more than four years, said Assistant Fire Chief Scott Erke. Now that it’s over, the department has a greater sense of professionalism and higher performance, he said.

“We’ve always held ourselves to a very high standard,” he said. “Expectations are much higher nowadays.”

Erke said although the Center for Public Safety Excellence granted the department accreditation, it also offered 11 recommendations for further improvement.

He said, for example, one of the recommendations was to investigate whether the fire department has a backup plan if the current office manager decides to leave the post. So far, the department has addressed six of the 11 recommendations. Among other recommendations was that the department continue to explore the feasibility of a combined dispatch center for all county fire departments, and that it implement a quantitative risk assessment tool.

Ugaste said Wauwatosa is one of eight fire departments in the state to have such credentials.

Easing the Public

The fire chief said the process not only puts city leaders at ease, but also proves that the department needs the materials and number of firefighters that it does.

“It’s one thing for me to say they do a good job, but this proves it,” said Mayor Kathy Ehley. “It’s very tangible proof. They are working all the time to function better, more efficiently and wisely use taxpayer dollars.”

Ehley traveled to Atlanta to testify on behalf of the fire department in front of the Center for Public Safety Excellence. She said she’s proud of the department she’s worked so closely with throughout the years.

“It is a tremendous amount of work and analysis of their process,” she said of the process. “They had to be very open to looking at how they do things and how they can make it better, which I admire.”

Ugaste added the department’s accreditation doesn’t last forever. The fire department is required to complete the process every five years to maintain credited status. Additionally, the department must complete an annual compliance report each year and work on recommendations to be even better.

“I believe every fire department should go through this and do this, but it is a lot of work,” Ugaste said. “Some fire chiefs are afraid of what it might reveal and don’t want to have to deal with that. We’ve tried very hard to be transparent and if we have a shortcoming we’ll own it and try to fix it.”

© 2015 Journal Media Group