Strategic Planning for EMS Agencies

You are the EMS director for a small municipal EMS third service that provides both ALS and BLS services. One day, the town supervisor calls you into his office. During the conversation, he mentions that he has noticed an increase in the number of commercial ambulance services in the area. Considering this, as well as the decrease in billing reimbursement your ambulance service has been experiencing, he wants to know what the short- and long-term goals and objectives of the EMS department are, as outlined in your strategic plan. Taking in your silence and quizzical expression, the supervisor offers to set up a workshop with a local EMS consultant to help you develop a plan.

After the meeting, your mind is spinning. You know that the supervisor is “on your side” but you’ve never even thought about strategic planning before, let alone had to assist in writing and implementing a plan. Immediately, several questions come to mind: What is a strategic plan and what does it encompass? How do you write one? Is it difficult to implement? The task seems daunting, to say the least.

Many EMS managers may not have been exposed to a strategic planning process. But regardless of size, all prehospital organizations can benefit from this common business management tool. When we hear news of a private EMS service going out of business due to an inability to weather economic downturns, or a volunteer ambulance squad failing to recruit or retain sufficient numbers of volunteers to staff its operation, rarely is it considered that one of the significant contributing factors may have been the organization’s lack of focus and direction. Perhaps such events would not occur if an agency had a well-thought-out, long-term strategic plan.

Definitions

Strategy in business is defined as “the pattern of objectives, purposes or goals and major policies and plans for achieving those goals, stated in such a way as to define what business the company is in or is to be in and the kind of company it is or is to be.”1 A strategic plan, according to one state health department, is defined as “a document that defines the needs of an organization that will enable the organization to realize its vision and mission.”2 Another definition, from the Internet Nonprofit Center, states that strategic planning is “a disciplined effort to produce fundamental definitions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does and why it does it, with a focus on the future.”3

Strategic planning is rooted in future-oriented, proactive thinking that anticipates change and adopts long-term strategies to meet the demands of that change.4 In other terms, a strategic plan is a “master plan” for your EMS agency. It is a management tool that will assist your organization in focusing its energy. There are both short- and long-term strategic plans. The objectives can be immediate (accomplished within one year), short-term (two to five years) and long-term (more than three years to initiate and less than 10 years to complete). The scope of this forecasting should focus on multiple facets of your agency, including, but not limited to, finance, personnel, logistics, operations and administration.

Mission Statement

In crafting a mission statement, you should seek to summarize the what, how and why of your organization. Your mission statement should represent a guiding set of ideas that can be articulated, understood and supported by the organization’s stakeholders, board, staff, members, customers and other key players. The importance of the mission statement to the overall strategic plan is that it provides direction by answering the “what is our business?” question, as well as providing a basis for goals and strategies.

A good example of an EMS-specific mission statement is that of Boston (MA) EMS:

Boston Emergency Medical Services is a community-based public health and public safety service that provides and manages the integrated prehospital care system for the city of Boston to improve the health of the community.6