While we had many successes and made much progress during 2018, we continue to look for more opportunities to improve the tools and strategies we use to care for our community.

In 2019, our focus will be on developing a strategic plan for the organization that will guide our decisions — from budget considerations to recruitment to public engagement — for the coming years. 

Challenge and Opportunities

As the DNVFRS looks to the future, we will maintain a heightened awareness around the changes facing our community.

Our population is aging, which means we need to ensure pre-hospital care continues to meet the needs of this important demographic.

At the same time, as the number of wildfires rises due to climate change, we will continue to increase the work we do around wildfire mitigation, preparedness, and response.

Strategic Planning

In 2018, we began an inclusive process to re-examine our organizational mission, vision, and core values.

As this process wraps up in 2019, we will begin to engage both internal and external stakeholders as part of our overall strategic planning process. 

This activity will be used to set priorities, focus energy and resources, strengthen operations, ensure that our personnel and other stakeholders are working toward common goals, establish agreement around intended outcomes/results, and assess and adjust the organization's direction in response to an ever-changing environment.

Fire Investigations

We are working to ensure that our fire investigators have the tools and safety gear necessary to perform this mandated service, by commissioning a state-of-the-art fire investigation unit.

We further plan to make fire inspection and fire incident preplanning mobile, and add real-time data updates.

Finally, we’ll be looking at replacing an aging fleet of gas-fueled inspection vehicles with alternate fuel vehicles.

​Public Education

We are exploring funding and community sponsorship to develop a new demonstration fire safety house, which would be shared with the City of North Vancouver and the District of West Vancouver.

We will also be pursuing additional opportunities to open the doors to our fire halls, and welcome the community.

We're updating our Grade 3 school fire safety outreach program.

Finally, in 2019 and into 2020, we will continue developing a 'FireSmart' community, through a public outreach program.

A FireSmart community puts valuable fire protection knowledge in homeowners’ hands, empowering them to improve safety for themselves, their families, and the community.​