Project: Daily Observation Report evaluating new employees at an EMS agency
Scope: Field Training Officer evaluation (Forms), Most Recent DOR review page, At-A-Glance New Employee Review
Problem: Field Training Officers (FTO’s) who had been tasked with training and evaluating employees new to an EMS agency were having a difficult time completing the existing Daily Observation Report (DOR). This difficulty was due to the DOR being on paper with limited explanation for the different values in each category for evaluation. The FTOs had to scan each completed DOR and upload it to an online repository for each candidate. The FTO coordinator was having difficulty reviewing each new employee’s progress due to the DORs being inconsistently completed, titled, and uploaded.
Goals: Create a digital version of a paper form that is more streamlined than the paper version. Create a website with instantaneous results from the most recent DOR which can be reviewed with the new employee. Create an At-A-Glance website giving trends of results in each category which can be reviewed by Field Training Officers and the Field Training Officer Coordinator.
Solution: The first iteration of the solution was to create a digital version of the DOR which stored the results in an Excel file. This form was easier for the FTOs to fill out. This solution also created a Most Recent DOR review page which was easier and more understandable for new employees to review. The At-A-Glance review page created in this solution automatically sorted the results of each category, providing a visual representation of trends along with all applicable comments.
Results: FTOs were thrilled with the faster digital version of the DOR and participation went from ~50% to ~90% each shift. The FTO coordinator was able to review new employee progress much more quickly, resulting in faster identification of areas of deficiency. Retraining and remediation were performed much more quickly, resulting in the average time a new employee was in the training process decreasing from an average of eight months to three months.