Diabetes mellitus is a leading cause of human disease, with 25.8 million Americans affected. It is estimated that 7 million (27%) of these patients are still formally undiagnosed. Diabetes can cause chronic or sudden signs and symptoms, which often result in observers calling 911 for assistance. The Emergency Dispatcher's interpretation of these calls affects dispatch triage and pre-arrival patient care. To determine the relationship between the EMDs' assigned Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS) determinant codes and patient severity indicators as determined by paramedic (or EMT) on-scene...
Emergency dispatch is a relatively new field, but the growth of dispatching as a profession, along with raised expectations for help before responders arrive, has led to increased production of and interest in emergency dispatch research. As yet, no systematic review of dispatch research has been conducted. This study reviewed the existing literature and indicated gaps in the research as well as potentially fruitful extensions of current lines of study. Dispatch-related terms were used to search for papers in research databases (including PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE, EMCARE, SciSearch, PsychInfo...
911 centers receive a wide variety of calls for police-related incidents. Using the Police Priority Dispatch System (PPDS®), a 911 Emergency Police Dispatcher (EPD) categorizes each incident with a specific Chief Complaint (CC) and prioritizes the case using a systematic alpha-numeric coding matrix. The wide variation in CC types and specific codes assigned can profoundly affect staffing and resource deployment decisions made by law enforcement agencies. However, the frequency of specific call types and priority levels in the PPDS has not been studied formally to date. The objective of...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
The difficulty of evaluating mental status, particularly alertness, is more pronounced in the medical dispatch context, where the Emergency Medical Dispatcher (EMD) must work through the eyes and ears of the caller, who is most likely a layperson. Determining true non-alertness and the level of its effects on outcome needs to be solved to perfect the interrogation and response-coding processes at dispatch.
In 2018, the Police Council of Standards reviewed and subsequently approved a proposal for change that includes additional instructions to callers, stating “Do not approach officers with any weapons in your hands, keep your hands visible at all times and follow their commands.”
