NORTH LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — When a medical emergency happens, minutes — even seconds — can matter, and the North Las Vegas Fire Department is making strides in getting to its residents faster in their time of need.
I spoke with North Las Vegas Fire Chief Joseph Calhoun to get a closer look at the numbers and to find out what's driving these improvements.
Chief Calhoun said a lot of it comes down to better leveraging of a key partnership.
He said the city has long had a partnership with MedicWest, a private ambulance company, to help supplement and support emergency medical response.
But he said there was a disconnect.
"We didn't know where those vehicles were located; they weren't in our system. We weren't in control of those vehicles," Chief Calhoun said.
So, around 2022, he said they decided to take a different approach to their partnership with MedicWest.
"We buy their units. They provide the people, they provide the vehicles, but they're our units. We put them where we want. They're on our system, they're dispatched by our dispatch, and we treat them no different than any of our other ambulances we have on the road," he said.
Now, he said they're able to strategically place MedicWest units where his department has gaps in coverage. Chief Calhoun shared the map below with me — the red stars are the city fire stations and the black circles are MedicWest units. You can see how they're interspersed to ensure coverage citywide.
Take Station 51, located near East Carey and Las Vegas Boulevard North, for example. It's being rebuilt, so it's currently closed. They've moved three MedicWest units to cover that area in the meantime and ensure a swift response, despite having no fire station there currently.
"As a department, we're very data-driven. We look at where trends are happening, where we have growth going on and we do that monthly. We look at where we're missing the mark on certain types of calls, and we can make changes to our system, especially our MedicWest units that we lease," he said.
He said they're now starting to see the benefits of that new system, and there are numbers to prove it.
In emergency response, goal response times vary by the severity of the call. For example, the goal response time for a "P1", or priority 1 call, will be much lower than a "P5" call, which is less acute.
Departments don't just have one goal response time they're looking to meet; they have several, and they vary by the level of the emergency. The general benchmark in emergency response is to hit those goal response times for each type of call 90% of the time.
In 2022, NLVFD was meeting its goal response time for P1, the most acute EMS calls, only about 70% of the time.
With the changes and investments that have been implemented since, NLVFD met its goal response time about 85% of the time for P1 calls in 2025. In the first quarter of 2026, that number has gone up to nearly 86%.
The department also made strides in responding to P5 calls faster. They went from meeting their goal response time for P5 calls only about 76% of the time in 2022 to 94% of the time in 2025 and the first quarter of 2026.
In fact, NLVFD is now responding to P2, P3, and P5 calls within their goal response time more than 90% of the time, and they're very close to the 90% goal for P1 and P4 calls.
"This year, to continue to fine-tune those numbers, we added an additional middle-of-the-day-when-we're-busy ambulance from MedicWest, an ILS ambulance for some of our lower acuity calls, and then Station 51 is opening at the end of this year which will then provide additional coverage in that area and free up some of those MedicWest units for us to fill in gaps in the other part of the city," he said.
He said they're proud of the strides they've made, but are still focused on growth and improvement.
"Those numbers, even though we're doing really good, I think even by the end of this year, we'll be doing even better," he said.
"It comes down to providing the best impact for the community, and I think we're doing that," he went on to say.
