Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us in the employer relations and public safety committee meeting, also known as ERPS.

I am Ledina Bolton, your Super District 7 Commissioner and Deputy Presiding Officer, but also the chair of the ERPS Committee.

Also joining me on the committee is Commissioner Nicole Masaya of District 3, and then our fellow commissioner Robert Patrick of District 1.

And oh, we also have District 2 Commissioner Michelle Long Spears.

So we only have just a few moments.

As you can tell, we're starting a bit late.

Our committee meeting.

So we're gonna go ahead and jump into the minutes.

Item 2026 1068, all commission districts.

These are the mint minutes for the June 18th meeting.

Do we have a motion for that item?

Thank you so much.

Um, Madam Chair, I've had our opportunity to review those minutes, and my motion is to approve them.

Second, all in favor.

Aye.

Motion carries recommendation for approval.

Following, we do have a discussion that we are excited to hear from our EMS services and update, and I believe that should be loaded.

Chief, are you presenting?

Are you really?

Go ahead then.

All right.

Good afternoon, everyone.

Just a moment.

Can we have it up on our screens as well?

Or if there is a printout, can you please share that with us?

Okay.

All righty, we're ready for you, sir.

Absolutely.

So I'm excited to uh come and give a comprehensive update on our EMS services.

Um, as you know, um, as of July 1st, we entered a new contract with our partner with AMR.

And so I want to kind of just give an oversight of some of the progress that we've made over the past year.

Last year in 2025, uh the CAP Fire Rescue we responded to 1,333, over 1,000 uh 33,000 calls in the system.

Uh, we did see a slight uptick in our call volume, and we've continued to kind of see that trend moving forward uh since 2024, but we saw a slight decline in our uh call volume.

Just to give you an uh understanding of what you get in our services, all of our units that respond to calls in DeCab County, all of our members are trained to at minimum the EMT basic level.

That means that every fire truck, every engine, every rapid response vehicle there responds to calls in DeCab County, they have at least an EMTB.

We also have our EMS division where we're currently operating on average about five to seven ambulances, and those run from ALS and BLS.

So those units also have paramedics on them as well.

The goal is what we're reaching for is to get up to 10 ambulances uh in the system at one time, and that's really to give us the unit that 240 unit hours that kind of that's that sweet spot for us that we would like to be at.

So system enhancements, and this is a lot of the things that went in place in the new contract.

A lot of our systems increase what we had was an increase in unit hours, and this was a to balance the demand of the emergency services and uh mainly to focus on these high priority calls.

Uh with this new contract, we also have uh increase of minimum requirement of 600 unit hours that AMR is providing.

And obviously, if they do not meet that, there the is a 200 fine for each hour that's below that minimum of $600.

Also, we're uh working really hard to on our APOD times, and that's the time that we spend at the hospitals.

Um, obviously that can become a strain on the system if we see units that obviously transport uh patients to the hospital, but then we wind up staying at the hospital waiting to get them offloaded.

So uh really been working with our regional partners on uh trying to reduce those APOD times.

And then there's other things that we're doing to the system where uh such as Nurse Navigator, which is and as well as our uh MIH program, and those are aimed at more so of our lower priority calls.

Um that does it's a large portion of the calls that we get.

And um, if you go to the next one, what you can see with our nurse nav, you can see the number of calls that we have used Nurse Nav for and what nurse navigation is if you're not familiar, is a call comes into 911 dispatch.

If it meets certain requirements that would then deem it as a lower priority call is sent over to Nurse Nav, and what they try to do is mitigate that call where it's not going to utilize a transport unit that needs to be serviced.

Um as you can see, uh we've been very successful with this nurse navigation program.

What it does is again it helps keep a number of our units available.

You can see we have a 4.8 out of five as far as our patient satisfaction, and uh 92% of our patients, they don't call 911 back.

So it is a very successful program.

Um another thing that we're really excited and enhancement that we're very proud of is our whole blood program.

Um is something that we started back in 2025, and this gives us the ability to obviously to give blood to these are more critical uh calls that we're running.

Um it gives us a 90% survival rate on these non-traumatic arrest patients, and um what as of today we've uh we've given out 123 units uh to patients.

So really proud of that program is something that we all like to keep around and continue to see it grow.

This next one is talks about our unit hours, and what you can see is that since 2025, we've had a uh studied increase increase in our unit hours.

As of today, uh AMR is averaging 676 unit hours, the CAP fire rescues submitting uh 93 unit hours.

So that that increase in unit hours is what's doing having a huge impact on our response times and just our overall service model.