Identification of persons based on verbal descriptions is one of the key skills of police work. Gathering as much description information as possible immediately following the event—for example, at the point of emergency police dispatch—could substantially improve the accuracy of suspect descriptions, the ability to locate missing persons quickly, and other key outcomes of effective police work. The primary objective of this study was to determine what amount and type of persons description information is collected by...
Sick Person (Specific Diagnosis) is one of the most commonly used Chief Complaint Protocols in the Medical Priority Dispatch System™. Within the Sick Person Protocol, the 26-A-1 coding represents a group of patients with no specific identifiable complaint. This vague categorization presents a problem for dispatch systems and EMS responders alike, since so little is captured about the patient's true condition. The objective of this study was to determine whether changing the order of the "No" answer choice on the...
Opioid overdoses have reached critical proportions in the United States of America (USA or US) and worldwide. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that more than 90 Americans die every day from opioid overdose, and the epidemic was recently declared a national public health emergency. One response to the crisis has been to increase the availability of naloxone HCl (commonly referred to by the brand name NARCAN), a treatment that reverses the effects of opioid overdose when injected or inhaled. The Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS®) version 13.0 includes instructions...
In emergency dispatching, pre-alerts are used to send responders to calls prior to getting a final dispatch code—assigned using an emergency dispatch system. Although this dispatching process has been used for several years, no research studies have demonstrated its significant benefit, in general. However, a study published in 2013, showed that pre-alerts can be effectively used to reduce dispatch time for out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCAs), which has the potential to improve overall patient outcome. As emergency calls are received, the call is entered in the Computer Aided Dispatch...
Providing information about possible weapons on scene is an essential objective of police dispatching and clearly valuable to officer safety. However, up to now, no information has been available about how often callers report weapons as "involved or mentioned" in an incident, what types of weapons are most commonly reported, or which incident types most commonly have reported weapons associated with them. The primary objective of this study is to determine which types of weapons are reported most often and on which Police Priority Dispatch System (PPDS®)...
The objectives of this study were to compare hospital-confirmed acute myocardial infarction (AMI) outcomes with emergency medical dispatch (EMD) low acuity cases and to identify any common characteristics of the AMIs assigned to those low-acuity codes. This was a retrospective study utilizing EMD, emergency medical services (EMS), and hospital discharge datasets, collected at two emergency communication centers in Salt Lake County, Utah. The study sample included all hospital-confirmed medical cases that arrived to the hospital via EMS. Primary outcome measures...
Although it makes up only about 1-2% of all emergency calls for help, sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) remains one of the most deadly—and one of the most hotly debated—topics in emergency services. Emergency Medical Dispatchers (EMDs) can play a critical role in improving survival rates for victims of SCA. In order to provide the most timely, effective care, EMDs must first identify that an SCA is occurring, then move quickly to provide instructions for bystander CPR. To support the achievement of these twin goals, the American Heart Association (AHA) has recently released proposed standards for...
Some have argued that there is no need for a dispatcher stroke evaluation because emergency medical services (EMS) responders can perform a more detailed, in-person stroke evaluation in the field. In fact, little or no research exists to determine whether dispatch stroke evaluations are actually redundant when compared with EMS field responder assessments. The purpose of this study is to determine whether some strokes identified by emergency medical dispatchers (EMDs) are not identified by field paramedics. The descriptive study utilized data from...
