Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service’s Quality Assurance Essay

Aims and objectives

This research seeks to explore the quality standard and also review several quality assurance systems applied by the Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service.

It will conclusively identify and recommend ways in which the research findings can be disseminated.

Introduction

Quality is the level to which integral characteristics measure up to required and mandatory standards.

Quality assurance systems are benchmarks put in place to continuously evaluate the organization’s performance.

They also are considered to gauge a given organization performance relative to other organizations in the same field.

Quality Assurance Systems

The quality assurance systems have guidelines tackling issues in work and operating environments.

Quality assurance relies on the approval of entities outside the organization. This approval is given after an assessment of the system to check conformity.

Incident Recording Systems (IRS)

• Are event recording systems used to electronically collect and confirm data?
• The collected data is used by fire officers, making them able to make quick and valid decisions.
• The data collected is uploaded to a web-based form for analysis to improve response to similar incidents.
• After analysis, the data is then published, which is simply to send the information to the Community for Local Government(CLG) (Hoyle 57).
• The IRS is also advantageous in its function of printing standard reports and ease of retrieval of the reports for use in other systems.

Integrated Risk Management Plan

• The Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue plans to have a protected society by minimizing the losses from fire and other incidents. To attain this, it uses a command system to predict responses and plan for appropriate resources and training.
• The Fire Service Emergency Cover (FSEC) is adopted to analyze threats posed to communities.
• The FSEC also has lifestyle data to evaluate and pinpoint the persons who are at risk
• The plan is frequently reviewed to ensure that the plan is updated on risk information contained.
• The plan works under these phases:
  • Identification of existing risks.
  • Evaluation of countermeasures.
  • Identification of improvements prospects.
  • Allocation of resources and setting policies and guidelines to be followed.

Prince 2

• The Project IN Controlled Environments(PRINCE) is a progression based quality assurance standard.
• It ensures that organizations achieve more efficiency in management and risk assessments (Bentley198).
• The efficiency is achieved because it focuses on the why, when, and for whom of entities of projects.
• The system defines the whole standardization process and checks the progress against the plan
• Its merits are ease of usability, the minimized errors, and superior resource control.

Health and safety standards

• Investment in the health and safety guideline ensures efficiency in risk management.
• Policies are set to ensure reduced financial losses by conservation of the human resource.
• There are key stages to meet the health and safety standards:
  • Policy
  • organization
  • planning,
  • quantifying,
  • performance audit,
  • evaluation. (Hughes and Ferret 124).

Conclusion

• Ensuring quality assurance requires a commitment to set targets. This involves a constant review of policies governing the quality assurance systems to ensure positive progress.
• From the review, improvement of incident reporting systems can be made to ensure quality service delivery.
• Furthermore, a positive health culture should be promoted by enhancing health and safety standards.

Works cited

Bentley, Collin. PRINCE 2: A Practical Handbook. 4^th ed. Oxford: Reed Publishing Ltd: 2001.

Hoyle, David. Quality Management Essentials. 2007 Ed. United Kingdom: Elsevier Ltd.

Hughes, Phil & Ed Ferret, Introduction to Health and Safety at Work, 2005 Ed Oxford.