911, can I help you?

[celticcare]

We have a priority staging system built into our emergency dispatch system here. If a call percieves as being non life threatening or emergent, then the call is catagorised as a priority three and four and the caller is told it can take up to an hour (so they are forewarned, most of the time an ambulance is there before that time, but it is a statement that has to be said) and if anything changes, they are to ring again and let us know.

This seems to work from what I can ascertain. There is the divert system in place so if responding to a call and a higher ranking one of a priority one or two status comes through, then the nearest unit is dispatched, which can be an ambulance on the way to a priority three or four job.

Hard call on the patient with demanding to go to hospital in regards to medicolegal issues, I don't know how to answer that one. We have a different legal system here and if the patient is explained that they do not need to attend hospital or if we can take them to a doctors surgery, often it suffices. I have a had various calls like that too and it frustrates you. But again, as afore mentioned in previous posts, if a patient is calling with something that they deem an emergency, then we have to act as emergency medical personell. Its like a pain score, we cannot percieve an individuals pain or their tolerance, so it is individual to each circumstance. and yes there will be some who will always abuse it and their numbers are logged in the system and also there are those who will not want to bother the poor ambulance officers time or those busy nurses and doctors at the ER and they are the ones we will end up responding to in Cardiac arrest.

Education yes is the key, but it seems to be aimed primarilly at children how to call for help and when not to help, but maybe some public education campaigns need to be put out. TV perhaps? I mean how many people do we hear that say "well I saw this once on TV...."

Scotty