This review of Card 13-Charlie: Diabetic Problems suggests that the MPDS system performs effectively in triaging diabetic emergencies. The rate of critical under-triage is low. Only 15 of 1,683 patients (0.89%) were identified as higher-acuity cases than initially dispatched.
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 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).
Most UK ambulance services undertake remote clinical consultation of 999 emergency calls.
The following case is a medical emergency call handled by a large metropolitan emergency medical service (EMS) agency. This agency handles over 12,000 emergency and non-emergency ambulance calls per month in an area over 270 square miles, with a population of around 500,000.The emergency medical dispatcher (EMD) used the Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS®) version 13.3 (NAE) to handle this call.
Chest pain is the 3rd most common response type for EMS systems in the United States, comprising approximately 10% of 911 calls (NEMSIS, 2021)Chest pain is the 3rd most common response type for EMS systems in the United States, comprising approximately 10% of 911 calls (NEMSIS, 2021).
Most United Kingdom (UK) ambulance services undertake remote clinical consultation of 999 emergency calls, often using computerised decision support systems, such as the Emergency Communication Nurse System (ECNS). In 2021 the Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust implemented ECNS in a novel way. Both nurses and paramedics used the tool to assess the full range of Advanced Medical Priority Dispatch System (AMPDS) codes and acuities. This study reports the ECNS outcomes of the full range of AMPDS codes, aiming to inform future discussion, protocol evolution, and clinical models internationally.
For over 10 years, the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch has been collecting data from emergency dispatch agencies across North America and has amassed one of the largest and most detailed sets of emergency medical dispatch calltaking data available. As of the writing of this report, 262 agencies using the electronic version of the Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS®), known as ProQA™ have shared over 30 million cases of detailed, deidentified calltaking data with the IAED. This data is aggregated and made publicly available in a set of interactive dashboards.
There can be several barriers to performing effective CPR on patients who call 911 service for help. One of the most challenging barriers is repositioning a patient found by the caller in a prone position i.e., on his/her belly. Existing medical dispatch pre-arrival instructions (on Medical Priority Dispatch System [MPDS®] Protocols Panel C2) provide no specific scripted instructions for repositioning the patient from prone to supine.
Studies suggest cardiac arrest risk associated with abnormal seizure-like activity increases with age, particularly in patients aged 35 or over. To account for this increased risk, there may be a need to add a new MPDS determinant code with a higher priority designation—probably one at the DELTA level.