Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue Service

Background
Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue Service are using Integral mForms® to assist firefighters in working with the government’s Home Fire Risk Assessment initiative.

“The modern fire service is as much about prevention as firefighting”, says Andy Robinson, GIS Development Officer for Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue Service. “Firefighters visit residents to help them reduce the risk of having a fire in their homes.”

Previously, this required the answering of a two-page questionnaire by each household, the contents of which were then re-keyed into a SQL database by the firefighters themselves.

Solution
In their goal to save time and money and provide a more efficient service, Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue researched the available solutions and rapidly decided that Integral mForms® was most suited to their needs. “The application had to be easy for our firefighters to use with a minimum of technical training.” says Andy Robinson. “We also had a short window for development.”

A successful pilot allowed firefighters to take a Windows Mobile 5 based PDA into a household, do a quick and effective survey of the home, and then return to their fire station. Back at the fire station all they had to do was to place the handset onto the cradle and the information was automatically uploaded to the Microsoft SQL database.

Benefits
“The response to our six-month pilot was very positive,” says Andy Robinson. “What used to take half an hour per form is now input in seconds through a single synchronisation – with better data integrity and quality of information.” As a result the Service is now implementing a full, roll-out programme of over 100 users across the entire geography of Gateshead, Newcastle upon Tyne, North Tyneside, South Tyneside and Sunderland.

There are other applications to come. Andy Robinson is looking forward to using Integral mForms® to develop applications to assist with legislative demands and operational preparedness, for instance using an Integral mForms® application to assess potentially hazardous buildings.

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