Jul 31, 2019
In the second part of this two-part series we finish our conversation with Captain Joe Powers, FO, from the Henrico County Division of Fire. This episode looks at the external side effects of CRR, focusing on how CRR can have a positive impact on the fire department's relationship with your community's governance. City and town administrators may speak a different language, focused on outcomes (lives and property saved) versus outputs (response time, number of calls), and CRR can be an instrumental part of helping you bridge this gap. According to Captain Powers, "When we start thinking in the form of outcomes rather than outputs, we're able to start looking at, let's say commercial fires in a completely different way. Rather than thinking about the number of commercial fires that we ran last year over a given period of time, we can start looking at the tax revenue that we sustained through having a fire department that's able to respond quickly and mitigate incidents. We can also look at the job savings that occur. Outcomes are really the things that people care about. Outputs make pretty graphs a lot of times, but when it comes down to what elected officials and our community leaders are looking for, they're really looking for outcomes." Also, be sure to read Joe's blog post on this topic over at the Center for Public Safety Excellence. https://cpse.org/2019/07/16/side-effects-of-crr/