On January 19, 2020, relaxing in his Snohomish County living room and watching the early news reports about Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China—the city he'd just returned from—the patient became concerned. He had not been feeling well and decided to go to his primary care physician. Shortly after arriving at the physician's office, his doctor contacted the Health District Officer. They drew a blood sample and overnighted it to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lab in Atlanta. The patient went home to...
Utah Valley Dispatch Special Service District is located in Spanish Fork, Utah, and provides centralized dispatch services for police, fire, and Emergency Medical Service (EMS) agencies in Utah and Juab counties. All 45 dispatchers working in the center are certified in CPR, Emergency Fire Dispatch (EFD), and Emergency Medical Dispatch (EMD). These dispatchers are trained to give lifesaving instructions to callers during emergency medical situations. At the time of the call, the EMD was on her fourth week of training and taking 911 emergencies as well as...
Dispatcher-Directed Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR)—CPR instructions provided over the phone by a certified emergency medical dispatcher (EMD)--is one of the most
important, time-critical, tasks the EMD performs. Immediate initiation of bystander CPR's paramount in the survival of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) patients. When
handling such a case, EMD actions must be precise and efficient. This only happens when EMDs follow the scripted Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS) protocols in
the ProQA™ software consistently and indiscriminately.
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.
On Dec. 19th 2018 in Las Gatos CA, a 2018 Tesla Model S was dropped off at a tire shop by a tow truck after the owner noticed a low tire message on his vehicles message center. Shortly after 2 PM, while the owner was still present, the Tesla caught fire in the parking lot of the tire shop. The owner and an employee of the tire shop heard a hissing sound coming from the vehicle shortly before flames became visible. The vehicle was never involved in a collision nor was any work being done on it at the time.
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.”
On January 31, 2022, beginning at about 1730hrs, southern Saskatchewan was overtaken by an extreme blizzard affecting a population of approximately 600 000 people.
As the snowstorm raged, the team working at Medical Communications South was closely watching the provincial Highway Hotline website for a real-time view of road conditions. This website displays a map of the Saskatchewan road network, with roadways color-coded to indicate current driving conditions. The team watched as the map rapidly changed from yellow, the color of common winter conditions, to white--travel not recommended—and again to
