Incident Extras (Custom Fields)
At times, Fire Departments have specialized/local needs and unique circumstances that require them to track additional information on incidents.
For example:
- Tracking the estimated water usage (gallons used) on structure fires.
- Tracking if an incident is within a city boundary, or outside of the boundary.
- What time did a ambulance rendezvous occur?
- What "box number" or "borough" or "region" did the incident occur within?
- Did a "helicopter transport" occur?
- ... and many more.
Structured verses Unstructured
Both the incident narrative and incident notes are great places to store much of this information, but those are "unstructured fields", i.e. freeform written text, are hard to perform structured reporting upon. It is hard to extract "gallons used" cleanly from "We drained the engine, plus three tender loads".
Structured extras fields can be individually reported upon, and automatically validated to ensure they are completed.
A "gallons used" (integer number) field with "6900" (e.g. 1,500 + 1,800 + 1,800 + 1,800) is easy to tally in reports.
Structured fields can be checked for if they've been completed.
Structured fields can by typed (e.g. number, text, date, true/false) to ensure the correct information is entered.
Incident Extras
Incident extras (aka custom fields) are structured fields configured at the department level for some or all incident reports.
Configuring Incident Extras by Type
Incident extras are configured for all incidents, or configured for a given set of incident groups or incident categories.
For example:
- "Water Usage" on Structure Fires
- "Hydrant List" on Structure Fires
- "Helicopter Transport" on Medical Responses
Incident extras can be configured to match your incident categories.
Defining Incident Extras
Extras can be configured as a true/false (boolean), an integer or other number, or text including date and time.
| Field Name | The name of the field displayed to the user. |
|---|---|
| Field Type | The type of the field (e.g. boolean, integer, text, etc.) |
| Field Description | The longer description of the purpose of the field, displayed to the end user. |
| Field Group | The group (e.g. visual collection) where this extra will sit, with others in the same group. |
Contact Responserack
Reach out to Responserack if you would like to discuss incident extras for your department.