UNTOLD NUMBERS OF ACCIDENTAL DEATHS in the UK may have been prevented if not for the dispatching protocols.
The London Telegraph began looking into why so many people who had suffered falls were left lying for lengthy periods of time before an ambulance arrived. After digging into cases going back several years, they discovered that the computer program that categorizes the 9-9-9 calls by severity was downgrading serious injuries from falls to a lower priority.
While some of the nation’s ambulance trusts were manually overriding the computer and upgrading the calls properly, nearly half of them had issued strict orders to never override the computer’s classification. The Telegraph reports:
The danger in the system was created by the country’s most senior ambulance officials as they altered the program used by most control centres in an attempt to manage demand for 999 services.
Most ambulance services use an international computerised system designed in America. In the US version, a fall of more than 6ft receives the maximum priority response. However, the government committee which governs its use in this country decided that such cases should be deemed less urgent, and excluded from an eight minute category A target response time.
In doing so, they created a potentially lethal flaw in the system. It meant that if a call involved a fall of more than 6ft it was designated a lower priority – a category B response – despite the presence of life-threatening conditions which were supposed to receive the most urgent category A response.
Dr Jeff Clawson, the founder of the software technology, which is used by 3,000 emergency services across the world, said their stance betrayed a “profound misunderstanding” of how the system should be safely operated.
This practice has been going on for 10 years and it appears that there may have been literally hundreds of deaths that could have been avoided with a timely response.
Read the entire article from The Sunday Telegraph HERE for this astounding story.
Firegeezer adds that it has long been my suspicion that some ambulance administrators were pulling these stunts in order to distort response-time targets. By downgrading the dispatch, you automatically gain a few minutes leeway to meet your quotas. This has been done with severe burn cases also, where critical burn victims have been downgraded to Category B or C responses. The fact that this particular problem has been going on for 10 years strongly suggests some culpability of the administrators.
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