Vision Statement
The Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service vision is to be a learning organization consistently executing the mission while evolving to maximize value for our communities.
About Us
Mission
The Mission of the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service is to create and enhance public safety through measures to reduce vulnerability and improve resilience.
Guiding Principles
Our Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service providers will:
- Acknowledge that in all things, people come first and for them, we will do the right thing.
- Respect the fiscal, political, collegial, and other boundaries placed on our work.
- Be prepared to serve and protect our communities.
- Be professional, studious, and adapt to our context.
- Maintain a capacity to respond.
Additionally, we follow the County Executive's principles:
- Insisting upon customer satisfaction
- Ensuring high value for tax dollars
- Adhering to the highest ethical standards
- Appreciating diversity
- Being open, accessible and responsive
- Empowering and supporting employees
- Striving for continuous improvement
- Working together as a team
- Being accountable
Montgomery County Fire & Rescue Service
The Montgomery County (MD) Fire and Rescue Service (MCFRS), an Accredited Agency, is a full spectrum life safety agency protecting about 500 square miles and over 1 million people who live and work in Maryland’s most populous jurisdiction. Under the direction of Interim Fire Chief Gary Cooper, MCFRS is a combination system (volunteer/career) in the suburban Washington, D.C. area, operating with an annual budget of about $267 million dollars. The MCFRS annually handles over 120,000 emergency calls for service and is staffed by nearly 2,700 certified and trained career and volunteer responders.
In June 2013, MCFRS received the Congressional Fire Services Institute's Excellence in Fire-Based EMS Delivery Award. Amongst numerous criteria, MCFRS was singled out for distinction due to recent successes with our STEMI (ST Elevation Myocardial Infarction) Program. This program emphasizes rapid diagnosis, pre-hospital treatment, and prompt delivery of high priority cardiac patients to a cardiac catheterization lab. This collaborative effort is shared with our partner hospitals with an end-goal of “door to balloon” times of ninety (90) minutes or less, ninety (90) percent of the time.
In April 2017, MCFRS was honored by the Congressional Fire Services Institute for the development and implementation of its Montgomery County Non-Emergency Intervention and Community Care Coordination program. This program aims to reduce frequent emergency service 911 users for non-emergent conditions by connecting them with appropriate resources to more effectively assist in treating their conditions.
MCFRS established the Montgomery County Non-Emergency Intervention and Community Care Coordination (MCNIC3) initiative, a program that targets frequent utilizers of the 9-1-1 system and connects those patients to existing medical/social programs within their communities better able to meet their health care needs. Leveraging existing public and private health and social resources, MCNI3 enables fire department personnel to refer and connect patients to programs most appropriate to treat their conditions, while maintaining access to the patients’ progress. As a result, call volumes for EMS services among the highest users of EMS services have reduced, significantly.
In August 2018, MCFRS was voted by the Commission on Fire Accreditation International another five years of accredited status. MCFRS first achieved the coveted accredited agency recognition in 2007 and is currently only one of 250 fire departments worldwide who maintain this status. The fire service accreditation framework promotes continuous improvement and a never-ending pathway of achieving organizational excellence. This is achieved through comprehensive master and strategic planning, conducting and documenting a self-assessment against 252 performance indicators, and developing a community risk assessment and producing a standards of cover manual. The accreditation framework mandates much quantitative analysis of performance data and is validated by an outside peer assessment team once every five years.
While at the same time, the MCFRS was working to achieve Accreditation, the agency was presented with the National Fallen Fire Fighters Foundation (NFFF) ‘Seal of Excellence’ for not only being the first organization to institute all 16 Life-Safety Initiatives adopted by the NFFF, but also as being the largest agency to do so. The County Executive and then Fire Chief Tom Carr commissioned a Senior Citizen Fire Safety Task Force report that was presented and led to ‘SOS – Summer of Safety’, a multi-faceted life-safety program for seniors.