Over the weekend, my wife and I went through the drive through at a restaurant and as we were leaving an ambulance and a firetruck arrived both with sirens and lights going. It brought up the question of why two vehicles had been dispatched to this incident.
Anyone have any knowledge of the rationale used in dispatching emergency vehicles? Say you’ve got one person having a heat attack in a restaurant, will 911 always send two units. Is the redundancy in case one unit is involved in an accident or otherwise slowed/prevented from arriving on the scene quickly?
A fire truck is usually at a known location, an ambulance can be anywhere. My guess is that they send both in hopes of one of them getting there quickly.
That’s going to depend A LOT on the city and how the call was placed. If someone called and said “OMG WE NEED HALP!!!1” They’re going to send what they can without knowing anything.
In my city if you call 911 and tell them someone is having a heart attack/stroke/bleeding the fire truck (with EMTs) will show up first, if they they need to transport the person, they call in the ambulance. Why they do this, I’m not sure, but it’s been SOP for as long as I can remember. I would assume it has something to do with how many ambulances and fire trucks they have at the station. For example, if they have two fire trucks and one ambulance, they can send out a fire truck and still have one fire truck and one ambulance ready to go. This way, if they don’t need to transport anyone, they don’t have an ambulance tied up at a scene when they might need it somewhere else.
At least in the US, it appears traditional for every emergency response to include an ambulance as well as a fire truck.
I actually asked a firefighter this once, and I seem to recall that he said that it is because the firetruck has personnel on it that can help in a medical emergency. I also believe that it may be the case that the emergency call didn’t give all the information, so how does one know that there isn’t actually a fire?
Keeping units in reserve back at the station rarely makes any sense. An unused unit at a scene is actually in a better state of readiness to repond to a second call than one that is back at the station watching TV or washing the truck.
Another misconception is that medical calls are a two man job. Extra hands are usually needed for loading a patient on a trolly and getting that trolly out of the house. There is usually furniture to be moved, traffic to direct, and a multitude of other tasks the EMTs shouldn’t have to worry about.
In my area, they always send two to four units to the least priority situation. The township is required by charter to respond. A separate ambulance company is the one designated to actually transport the victim. The expense involves at least two vehicles every time and the ambulance company is the only one that receives any revenue from the response. It’s bureaucracy at it’s finest. The economy is causing them to rethink this silly protocol.
every fire station has a fire truck. the ambulance or lifesaving units may be spread out. some ambulances may be on calls, a fire truck could go back to the station while the ambulance handle the remainder of the emergency, the fire truck is available for the next call.
I had reason to call 911 for an ambulance about 2 years ago. Both a firetruck and an ambulance showed up. They ended up having to carry me on a tarp down a set of narrow stairs – a job that took 4 people to do it safely. So the firemen WERE needed in this case.
Assuming the “coverage area” for a unit is circular from the “center point” of their home base, answering a call on the western edge of their area puts them at a distinct disadvantage for answering calls on the eastern edge of their coverage area. They may gain a minute or two by being in the vehicle, but surely they’d lose more than that by being further away from their next call…
It varies somewhat from place to place, of course. Generally speaking, there’s a lot more fire apparatus than ambulances. The fire department acts as “first responders” and can provide care before the ambulance arrives. This is especially important for patients in cardiac arrest.
Also, most fire departments don’t run very many fires anymore, so they respond to medical calls to keep their run numbers up.
That’s only going to be a factor in rural areas where the likelihood of simultaneous emergencies is significantly less than a higher population area where a station’s service area is small enough to insure an acceptable response time from anywhere they might be called to. In a larger service area, a department will probably have a protocol in place that allows the captain to keep a unit in reserve if a call is to a distant location.
Fire trucks carry a lot of gear in addition to extra personel who might be needed for any number of things including traffic control, carrying people, dealing with belligerent spectators or upset family.
A person making a 911 call is not the best person to be assessing what might be needed. Do you need the jaws-of-life to pry someone out of a bad situation? The ambulance probably doesn’t have one. Do you want to wait while another call is made to get the right equipment? Probably not.
While we sometimes have too many first responders around, there is great comfort in having extra hands. In the small service I am on we respond to 6 different community’s that are between 6 and 12 miles away and all of them have fire department 1st responders that are called out every time. Manny Ambulance services are private services. Most 1st responders are fire departments run by the city government.
In MN the state is divided up into Primary Service Areas and that area is then licensed to a provider. Only a licensed service can transport a patent in a licensed vehicle.
Actually, a fire department can bill an insurance company for services they preform on motor vehicle crashes as well as structure fires. And we bill the state for responding to wildland fires.
In San Diego the response parameters were established by the fire fighters union which should explain why, when I called 911 for a possible heart attack victim, 4 vehicles and 11 firemen & EMTs showed up.
In a neighboring city, an ALS (more serious, basically) call gets a medic unit (ambulance) and an “assist” (almost always a piece of fire apparatus). A BLS (less serious) call only gets the medic unit. Every firefighter there is at least an EMT, so it’s not like the crew from the fire engine is just standing around waiting. In the city I live in, though, most ALS calls get only a single medic unit (I think the exception is possible cardiac arrests). But my city has enough staffing to put a crew of three on an ambulance; the neighboring city only has enough resources for two.
I was a volunteer firefighter and EMT in Virginia. An firertruck was usually dispatched with an ambulance to help with man power. Most ambulances only carried the driver and the EMT, if there was any lifting of patients, or carrying people on stretchers down steps, it helped to have an engine company on hand for extra muscle.
This.
Having firemen at the scene is good for everyone-though a bit more expensive. But remember, their fixed costs and labor are constant whether they are responding to a call or not. The added costs for fuel and maintenance are small in a depts. budget. And it keeps the fire dept in front of the public. Every time they run down the highway with their lights and sirens on, they are reminding the voting public that they are on the job and there when needed.