Huron County Council Receives Final Report From Operational Research In Health Limited

by Bob Montgomery

Huron County Director of Emergency Services Jeff Horseman says the county had asked Operational Research In Health Limited, or ORH, to give them a ten-year operational deployment plan. 

That plan would assume that the county maintained their response times that are mandated by both the province and county council for the next ten years. Horseman says that would mean predicting the call volume, based on things like potential increases in population and call volumes, how the demographics in the county change and what they're going to need to make sure that ten years from now they have the resources in place to continue to deliver the same level of service that they do today.

ORH does that by collecting all of the call volume data from the county from the last five or six years and analyzing that. They also get data from the planning department to determine how many people might be moving into the area in the future. The data gives them information on gender as well as age. Horseman says they take that information and impose that on their current deployment and estimate what their response times would be if nothing was changed or what they could change to improve those response time.

Their plans for the next ten years don't include adding stations. They could quite likely change a few locations and plan to increase staff and that's based on the projected increase in call volume. He says their predictions for the last five years are very close to the predictions of the ORH five years ago, so if nothing changes they’re confident the report will be accurate and they'll be able to implement the recommendations in the ORH report.