Why Do These Things Keep Happening?
Yesterday I was reading THIS ARTICLE from the Bend, Oregon, news about a vehicle accident in a remote area where the woman who was driving had her hand severed during the rollover. The car ended up on its wheels and off the side of the road. The driver was alone and besides the amputation she had a collapsed lung and obvious head injuries. There were no witnesses to the rollover, but other travelers were on the scene within moments of the crash.
Some of the people have had some experience with this sort of thing, one being a retired police officer and another was an ER nurse. Several calls were made to the local 911 center and that’s when things started getting screwed up. The focus of the article is how it took more than an hour for any sort of medical help to arrive on the scene.
It appears that the dispatchers in that region are so focused on assigning a proper priority to the calls that they lose sight of providing a timely and sufficient dispatch of help to the scene.
The collective recording of all the dispatch phone calls is HERE.
Listen to it and see if you agree that the dispatchers seem to be mired in protocol to the point of almost not functioning. The first call to report the MVA is routed to a neighboring county and they are passing along the info. which includes the fact that the car is on its wheels and the patient is conscious and breathing. Oh, yes…and there is debris on the road.
Ho, hum…just another wreck.
The next recording is dispatch notifying some FD and they decline the run because it is not blocking the roadway and there is no entrapment or fire.
Why not get SOMEBODY on the scene? Nope, not my problem.
Then the dispatcher phones back to the original agency that took the call to get some more information. And he gets a voice-mail recording. He dutifully leaves a message.
At least they didn’t ask him to press #1 for English.
Another incoming call from a bystander gets the response that they are sending the State Police to check it out. That’s when they first learn that “She’s missing her hand?”
Then comes my favorite. The dispatcher calls back to the cell phone of one of the bystanders and asks him what the color and make of the vehicle is. This is followed by a long chat and then the probing question: “What side of the highway is she on?”
For gosh sakes, woman…it’s the side with the wrecked car and the crowd standing around it!
Eventually word somehow reaches the Bend FD 911 center where they have real pro’s on the job. He dispatches a city paramedic unit – and informs the county dispatcher that it will be a 30-minute response time – and then activates the air ambulance. After all this initial fiddling goes on, it’s over an hour until the poor lass gets some medical attention.
And why did this happen? According to the newspaper:
But emergency workers now say they would have responded differently if they had known the severity of the accident and the extent of her injuries. Lackner’s ordeal, they say, shows how detailed communication with people on the scene is key. And lack of that communication, coupled with a remote location, can mean significant delays in response times.
That’s right, folks….they’re blaming the bystanders. The call-takers who kept asking about the vehicle description and obsessively recording the status of road debris without ever asking “What is wrong with her?” were just doing their job, working their way down the check-list.
Grrrrrrr.
Read Firegeezer’s previous 2-part rant on call-taker training HERE and HERE.
Ok, let’s get the equipment checked out. I’ll start the coffee.
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