Alertness is important to assess during many medical emergencies; however, assessing alertness proves difficult in a non-visual emergency dispatch environment. Little is understood about how to best gather an accurate report of patient alertness during an interaction between callers and Emergency Medical Dispatchers (EMDs). The primary objective of the study was to compare two versions of a Key Question (KQ) intended to gain an accurate report of alertness, to determine whether either demonstrates a higher degree of caller...

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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.

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