In June 2025, the York County 911 Center, York, PA, received a call from the wife of a 75-year-old male, described as not feeling well and having just fallen off the toilet. Upon initial Case Entry questioning by the Emergency Medical Dispatcher (EMD), the patient was described as “awake” and “breathing.” Within a few seconds of these responses, the caller rechecked the patient and changed her response to “He was a minute ago” (regarding consciousness), then, after a brief pause said, “He’s unconscious at the moment.”
911 callers with limited English proficiency (LEP) can make up a sizable portion of the overall 911 caller population, particularly in and around large cities where diverse ethnic and immigrant populations reside. 911 agencies have relied on both bilingual emergency dispatch staff as well as third-party translator services to assist with LEP callers.
To improve efficiency and prioritization of its 911 police calls, the City of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, implemented the Standardized, Protocol-based Police Priority Dispatch System (PPDS®) in its Emergency Communications Center (ECC) on March 1st, 2023. After a year of use, call-processing time and call-prioritization efficiency were compared to the previously used system.
In an effort to improve efficiency and prioritization of its 911 police calls, the City of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, implemented the Police Priority Dispatch System (PPDS) in its 911 center on March 1st, 2023. After a year of usage, call-processing time and call prioritization efficiency were compared to the previously used system.
In a recent study (see below poster), the Montgomery County Hospital District EMS service found that the Medical Priority Dispatch System’s Stroke Diagnostic Tool (SDxT) was able to identify true strokes—those confirmed by the receiving hospital—with a high degree of sensitivity and a comparable specificity to the face-to-face paramedic-initiated stroke activation (PISA).
Police emergency call-taking has always been a topic that has needed more research to help determine best practices, particularly in large urban dispatch agencies where lower priority cases often must be queued in order to ensure shorter response times to higher priority cases where life and limb could be at risk. A recent study completed at the City of Cincinnati Emergency Communications Center, and featured in this issue, has added some much-needed clarity to this important topic.
Seeking peer support when stressful conditions occur may seem like a natural and common occurrence among emergency dispatchers. Yet we lack complete information about how often it happens, and how helpful it really is. A repeat AEDR author and researcher, Paul Bourgeois, PhD., brings this practice into focus in this journal issue. Using an online survey, Bourgeois questions dispatchers about their utilization of, and attitudes toward peer support teams. His findings and conclusions will help us better
understand the best use of these teams and when to encourage dispatchers to seek help from them.
According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), 57.8 million Americans were estimated to have a mental illness in 2021—a cohort that represents 22.8% of all adults in the U.S. The same report estimates that 14.1 million of them have a condition defined as Severe Mental Illness (SMI), equaling 5.5% of U.S. adults.
Most UK ambulance services undertake a secondary assessment of 999 calls with nurses and paramedics to best manage delays in responses and reduce inappropriate admissions to hospitals. However, little is known about the differences in the types of cases managed by the two professions comparatively, their clinical outcomes, and the quality and safety they offer.
