Ariola presses on how many calls fall into untriaged dispatch category
Ariola asks how many people end up in the system without a dispatcher gathering additional information and proper categorization. Maiano says it is difficult to estimate but EMS strives to meet 100% of ambulance requests; Ariola calls the situation a dispatch abyss and says the child's parents drove him in critical condition.
I understand and appreciate your question, and it's very difficult for me to come up with a number.
What I can tell you is that we strive to meet 100% of the calls that come into 911 for requests of service for an ambulance.
Okay, so please just let me be clear.
This scenario is happening across the city, right?
And we just had a hearing recently where the 911 system was down.
for seven hours and there was no response and no notification.
This boy not only was one of the calls for help for a life-threatening symptom, but he went into a dispatch abyss.
Which is very important, even though it was searching, the system was searching, the system is a computerized system that doesn't know the severity of what this child was going through.
His parents had to put him into a car in critical condition because he was in the abyss.
And so far, we've done nothing to fix this issue.
And it's not just this administration.
It's administrations going back.
Decades that this is happening.
But I would like it to be fixed.