To meet current national challenges, emergency response equipment is being purchased at an increasing rate by federal, state, local, and tribal emergency responders, including fire departments, emergency medical service agencies, emergency management departments, law enforcement officials, and public servants. Although the equipment is often tested individually by the manufacturer in a controlled laboratory environment, the overall safety, quality, reliability, and maintainability of the equipment in field environments may be significantly impacted as each equipment item functions as part of an operational system.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has established the System Assessment and Validation for Emergency Responders (SAVER) Program to assist emergency responders making procurement decisions. The SAVER Program conducts objective assessments and validations on commercial equipment and systems, and provides those results along with other relevant equipment information to the emergency response community in an operationally useful form. SAVER provides information on equipment that falls within the categories listed in the DHS Authorized Equipment List (AEL). The SAVER Program mission includes:

• Conducting impartial, practitioner relevant, and operationally oriented assessments and validations of emergency responder equipment;
• Providing information that enables decision makers and responders to better select, procure, use, and maintain emergency responder equipment.

Information provided by the SAVER Program will be shared nationally with the responder community, providing a life-saving and cost-saving asset to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as well as to Federal, state, and local responders.

The SAVER Program established and is supported by a network of technical agents who perform assessment and validation activities. Further, SAVER focuses primarily on two main questions for the emergency responder community: “What equipment is available?” and “How does it perform?”