In emergency dispatching, providers often
arrive and find a situation completely different
from the EMD Coding. Guilford County
Emergency Services recently added BLS units
to our fleet and wanted to match determinant
codes to the correct responses to allow the
ALS level providers to be available for higher
priority calls. We looked at the on-scene
primary impression recorded by the provider as
well as the level of service.
Caller-party type may determine the accuracy of the information collected by the EMD. Has this distribution changed in the past decade? Are EMD’s gathering more accurate information? And why is the caller party dynamic changing? The objective is to retrospectively look at the distribution of the caller-party type in a mostly urban/suburban, high performance EMS system. ProQA data from 2004 to 2017 was extracted and evaluated to identify any trends. This was a retrospective, descriptive, and uncontrolled study of de-identified medical dispatch data, collected using ProQA data from an...
When evaluating the information provided by 911 callers, Emergency Police Dispatchers (EPDs) use scripted protocols to ensure that important details are not missed and that questions are not omitted. Specifically, at the beginning of the call, EPDs ask callers to "Tell me exactly what happened" (TMEWH). Since EPDs must select the correct Chief Complaint (CC) Protocol based on the caller's response, getting a complete response to TMEWH—and interpreting it correctly—is one of the most significant elements of an EPD's job. However, no studies have yet evaluated the use of TMEWH in gathering...
Isabel talks with Steve Zenes, 911 Operations Coordinator with the Morris County Communications Center. They discuss how police dispatch is different from fire and EMS, why "Tell me exactly what happened" matters, and parallels between police work and research...
The most critical and difficult part of the Emergency Police Dispatcher's (EPD) job may be the gathering of the initial problem description, which uses a scripted Protocol Case Entry Question (CEQ) but also requires interpretation on the part of the EPD. Specifically, at the beginning of the call, the EPD asks the caller the CEQ "Ok, tell me exactly what happened" (TMEWH). Based on the caller's response, the EPD selects a Chief Complaint (CC) Protocol—a specific protocol that provides the prompts to drill down into the caller's situation—the primary reason for calling 911. Selecting the wrong...
