Priority of ambulance program: Freeing up hospital beds
Feb. 06--Ambulances on Decatur streets have been using lights and sirens to rush patients not only to hospitals, but from them -- even when stable, non-emergency patients are bound for another hospital or a nursing home.
That's because when Decatur Morgan Hospital's main campus and Parkway campus have patients waiting to be seen, hospital officials quickly want to free up beds. Slow transports of stable patients to another hospital or to a nursing home create a backlog.
In an attempt to ease such backlogs, Decatur's two ambulance services will begin a pilot program Monday. Under the program, a new emergency response category called "urgent transports" will require ambulances to begin their response within 10 minutes.
The goal is to expedite the transport of stable patients when hospitals are short on beds, and to do so without the lights and sirens that go with an emergency transport.
Decatur Fire and Rescue Battalion Chief Ted McKelvey, the EMS coordinator, said urgent transports will fill an important gap between emergencies and non-emergencies.
"Currently on transports, we're sometimes having a 25-minute wait before the truck gets dispatched and another 15 minutes before the truck gets there," McKelvey said.
Summor Gooch, director of emergency services at Decatur Morgan Hospital Parkway Medical Campus, said the change could eliminate unnecessary risks.
"What we're doing now is categorizing them as emergent," Gooch said, even if the patient is stable.
To free up beds more quickly, hospitals have been calling for emergency transports of their patients, even if the patients are stable. The city's rules governing ambulance response times focus on the condition of the patient, not on periodic crowding at the hospitals. If the patient's condition is stable, ambulances have 30 minutes to respond to a call.
Morgan County 911 dispatchers determine the urgency of most calls. Because the need for an "urgent transport" is based on crowding at the hospital, not on the condition of the patient, the dispatcher would not evaluate the urgency.
"The ER staff would make that decision. They would call in and say, 'We currently have all our beds occupied by patients and we have this patient that is going to Decatur General West,' for example," McKelvey said. That would trigger the 10-minute response time.
Representatives of First Response and DEMSI supported the policy change at an EMS Committee meeting last week because it could reduce traffic risks. The EMS Committee voted unanimously to implement it.
EMS Committee Chairman Larry Sullivan said the committee would evaluate the success of the change at its next meeting, in April.
Eric Fleischauer can be reached at 256-340-2435 or eric@decaturdaily.com. Follow on Twitter @DD_Fleischauer.
Copyright 2014 - The Decatur Daily, Ala.
