Why do we get all these people (three firefighters complete with their big red truck, two ambulance attendants, etc.) at a simple medical call?
When a medical emergency is reported to the Public Safety Answering Point (911), dispatchers can not determine with certainty the exact nature or severity of the crisis. Additionally, medical emergencies tend to escalate during the time it takes to arrive on-scene. We send sufficient resources to handle the worst case situation and, in choosing what resources to commit, dispatchers must always act in the best interests of the patient. An old fire service maxim applies: Better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it. Pre-hospital care has, in our lifetime, grown from a matter of providing simple Load-and-Go services (with a fairly poor history of success), into a complex, highly technical field that involves electronic cardiac monitoring and defibrillation, intravenous fluid therapy and sophisticated intervention techniques, some of which were not available even in emergency rooms twenty years ago. This level of care, known as Advanced Life Support (ALS), has signifi
