Congrat's CEMLEC!

The West Hartford Police Department held it's 7th annual CT SWAT Challenge last week, 8/21-8/23. The team finished in 7th place among 37 teams. There were 6 shooting events and the grueling 5.5 mile PT Challenge with 33 stations was the toughest one yet.

Here, the team loads up for the multi-gun challenge. The tent was loaded with tear gas, a stray wind had the crowd of spectators coughing and giggling at the same time.

If an accident or injury should occur, the competitors had some of the best tac-medics going to take care of them.

Also of note, my friends with the Worcester Police SWAT came in a respectable 11th place. Very good for their second year out. 

The MA State Police STOP Team fought hard to defend their 2011 win but fell just shy to the CT State Police. 

 "It was a privilege to see the skill, precision, tactical prowess and camaraderie that we saw in these teams this year. " CSC 2012

Benchmarking Public Safety in Worcester: 2012

The news is good for WEMS and Worcester. 


EMS TRENDS
Since 1991, UMass Memorial EMS has provided emergency ambulance services in Worcester at no cost to the City.11 The all-paramedic, hospital- based service operates a fleet of six ambulances staffed by 50 full-time and 25 part-time paramedics.
Over the last ten years, the EMS workload has risen and response times have declined (Chart 812 and Chart 9). UMass Memorial responded to over 30% more incidents in 2011 than it did in 2002. During the same period, its average response time to all incidents has declined by 55 seconds. Its average response time to so-called priority one calls (life-threatening injuries or illnesses) went down 3 seconds to 5:05.

UMass staff believes that improved response times in recent years could be the result of the employment in April 2009 of new global positioning system (GPS) and CAD (computer aided dispatch) system technologies. These allow dispatchers to view the exact location of each EMS vehicle, and automatically identify street routes and calculate drive times. Also, in 2009, UMass Memorial EMS added six field supervisors to the system for purposes of better quality oversight and better integration with fire and police services, and in 2010, it added a Quality Assurance/ Performance Improvement specialist to oversee the preparation and analysis of metrics as well as monitoring the performance of paramedics. These and other recent improvements, which total millions of dollars, were undertaken and fully funded by UMass Memorial at no cost to the City of Worcester.
It should be noted that, with the exception of cases of cardiac arrest, rapid response times do not necessarily enhance a patient’s survival chances.


The whole report here:
http://www.wrrb.org/files/downloads/ongoing/benchmarking/pub_safety/2012/benchmarking-public-safety-in-worcester-2012.pdf