D4H Tags – reportable detail

We use D4H tags to record various aspects of our incidents and exercises. With tags we can do data analysis (should we ever need, including for grant application purposes) which allow us to pull reports that the same detail in the narrative would not.

As a fire department we provide NFIRS (National Fire Incident Reporting System) data on our incidents. We captured many of the NFIRS information requirements into groups of tags.

Our two main groups are “Response Categories” and “Training Categories” and for incidents we tag the main aspect of the call from the former. We then provide additional details through the other “Response *” groups of tags.

Our district covers three counties (which provides some interesting challenges) and we chose to record which county the incident occurred within.

We do add some “Special Handling” and “Miscellaneous” tags for other aspects (including events) but those are pretty specific to us/our needs.

Note: D4H doesn’t distinguish tags between incident and exercises, so our “Training Categories” tags (another posting) do show up, and so sometime users incorrectly select them. We created reports looking for any training tags incorrectly added to incidents and that allows us to capture those mistakes.

We’ve found that “D4H tags” are a very powerful and important aspect of D4H.