If one thing has defined emergency dispatching over the past 40 years, it has been the desire to always be doing it better: better interrogations of callers, better Pre-Arrival Instructions, better customer service—the list goes on and on. To drive constant improvement in dispatch is also the purpose of the Annals of Emergency Dispatch & Response. We aim to provide emergency dispatch professionals, whether line calltakers, quality assurance specialists, or communication center managers, with the best and most up-to-date information available about the critical work they do.
Lee County, Florida, has 108 golf courses. Snowbird season packs the golf courses with many who are older. Medical emergencies: stroke; cardiac arrest; fractures; back injuries; stings; and heat exhaustion are common. Access to patients on golf courses is challenging. Golfers can only see the lanais and back of houses—not street addresses. To design a Graphic Information System (GIS) and Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) solution to identify patient locations using common place names and verified addresses. GIS produced maps of all 108 courses were labeled with possible access points to...
Every year, 350-400 people die in submersed vehicles in North America, with these deaths accounting for up to 10% of all drownings. Vehicle submersion has the highest fatality rate of any type of single vehicle accident.5 Most of these incidents are survivable, as vehicles usually hit the water in an upright position causing, at most, non-disabling injuries; in these cases death results from either ineffective, or no, self-rescue actions by the victim(s). In general, emergency dispatch protocols for sinking vehicles have been either nonexistent or ineffective to deal...
The Health Contact Centre (HCC) in Brisbane Australia is one of the Health Support Queensland's services that provides clinical support, either directly to the community (4.7 million Queenslanders) or in support of Hospital and Health Services (HHS) and the Department of Health. Registered nurses (RNs) use the Emergency Communication Nurse System™ (ECNS™) as Clinical Decision Software System (CDSS) to triage callers who access this service via telephone. The RN uses a set of symptom-based protocols in the ECNS to telephonically triage the caller/patient and recommends the most...
Based on known unpublished sources (e.g. emergency communication center managers, training officers, dispatchers), emergency communication centers (ECCs) around the world provide training for new emergency dispatchers and continuing dispatcher education. However, little information has been collected, or shared, between ECCs regarding specific training methods that are being used, which methods are successful, and what factors influence their success. The objective of this study was to describe what training methods are currently being used in emergency...
Continuous Dispatch Education (CDE) is ongoing training for Emergency Dispatchers, Quality Improvement Specialists and Emergency Telecommunicators (ETC). Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS) wanted to improve current compliance performance to the Medical Priority Dispatch System™ (MPDS®) utilizing CDE. This study reports on the effectiveness of CDE efforts and staff motivation in completing CDE. The primary objectives in this study were to establish if structured CDE improved calltaker performance and to gather information about staff perceptions of CDE...
Measurement is a critical part of testing and implementing changes as well as identifying areas for further research, in prehospital care and dispatch. Kaunas, the second largest city in Lithuania, implemented the Medical Priority Dispatch System™ (MPDS®) to improve the efficiency, timely availability, consistency, and reliability of dispatch data and information. This in turn facilitated a research study into the care of cardiac arrest patients. Measurement is a critical part of testing and implementing changes, as well as identifying areas for further research...
Expanding the role of evidence-based practice (EBP) in emergency medical services is a matter of increasing importance to researchers and practitioners alike. However, this movement toward EBP has not yet been applied to one critical area of prehospital care: emergency dispatching. The primary reason for this gap is that emergency dispatchers (EDs) struggle to develop a research culture able to produce enough well-conducted studies to move toward true EBP. One starting point with documented potential for building the research capacity in a field is to develop...
Emergency Medical Services (EMS) agencies have a pressing need to understand call prioritization time (CPT), a key sub-component of call processing time in Emergency Medical Dispatch, as it impacts response time to specific cases and overall EMS agency response time performance. The objective of this study was to determine median CPT by dispatch priority level and Chief Complaint type. This retrospective study included data from six emergency communication agencies, each accredited by the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch (IAED)...
