Police emergency call-taking has always been a topic that has needed more research to help determine best practices, particularly in large urban dispatch agencies where lower priority cases often must be queued in order to ensure shorter response times to higher priority cases where life and limb could be at risk. A recent study completed at the City of Cincinnati Emergency Communications Center, and featured in this issue, has added some much-needed clarity to this important topic.
There is a wealth of evidence suggesting that long work hours and burnout affect performance among nurses and physicians. However, no studies have investigated this relationship among non-medical health care providers such as Public Safety Telecommunicators (PSTs), who play a critical role in patient safety.
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.
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).
