Denver Hospital Board Takes Action on EMS Response
DENVER, Colo. --
Citing a CALL7 investigation into December's plane crash at Denver International Airport, the chairman of the board of Denver Health Medical Center has called for action following a series of breakdowns in the hospital's ambulance response system.
Hospital officials told 7NEWS that valuable lessons were learned from the crash of Continental flight 1404 and the lengthy ambulance response to the tragedy.
They pledged "quantifiable changes" to the system with the goal of making sure a 33 minute ambulance response to a plane crash at DIA never happens again.
"Thanks to your story and other communication we know that we got some things we can do better. We learned a lot of lessons from this and in our board meeting we spent a lot of time talking about individual steps we can take to improve our operations," said Bruce Alexander, chairman of the board of Denver Health.
He was referring to a special CALL7 Investigation titled, "33 Minutes to 34 Right, Denver's Broken Ambulance System," hosted by Tony Kovaleski.
The investigation dissected Denver's ambulance response to the crash from the moment the plane left the runway until the first ambulance arrived on scene.
Recognizing the problems exposed in the CALL7 Investigation, hospital officials responded with a series of significant changes including an ambulance stationed at the airport and a new ambulance response policy to a plane crash.
Should it happen again, the hospital will immediately send four ambulances, at high speed, to the airport in addition to the on-site ambulance.
Also the board of Denver Health will now require regular analysis and reporting of the ambulance system's performance.
Alexander told Kovaleski, "Were going to look at where ambulance are posted throughout the city and were going to look at their use and how they are in use and what we can do to maximize it."
He continued, "Clearly the most important value is the safety of our patients and the safety of the citizens of Denver and that we can do to accelerate response times to improve the outcomes."
