Motor vehicle crashes (MVCs) can result in life-threatening injuries, and ambulances are therefore often dispatched at the highest priority response of lights and-siren (L&S). However, assigning L&S ambulance response based on type of incident alone may result in over-triage, meaning that the patient's condition did not warrant L&S ambulance response. Potentially, the ambulatory status of the MVC patient at the scene (i.e., whether they can walk) could help inform the ambulance dispatch priority, given that ambulation reflects...
The extent of fire emergencies in our communities is of great concern, not only to the public, but to the nation's fire departments, whose role is not only to respond to them, but to mitigate and, even earlier, to prevent them. The variety of types of fire-related emergencies reported to 911 is of significant interest to this ongoing mandate. The aim of this study was to characterize the distribution of calls handled using a Fire Priority Dispatch System (FPDS™) in the studied agencies. This was a retrospective and non-controlled descriptive study...
Time-to-dispatch in a 911 center continues to be a topic of much discussion in public safety. This study represents a first attempt to classify a subset of time-todispatch, call prioritization time, the time required to gather critical information prior to dispatching the call. The study characterizes call prioritization time in two Police dispatching agencies by determining overall median call prioritization time for all Chief Complaints (CCs) in the agencies studied, then by determining specific call prioritization times for the top five most commonly-used CCs...
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...
