Ariola asks about mutual aid and hospital diversion rules
Ariola asks how often mutual aid is used and when hospitals can divert certain ambulance patients. Miano says volunteer agencies help when available, while hospital diversions are evaluated by an EMS officer and may be limited to certain patient types or services.
So what is the current status of the supplemental tours via mutual aid?
In your testimony, you said you're utilizing.
So how often are you utilizing?
Only when needed, or are they available at all times?
So we put a request out to all the volunteer agencies that operate in New York City, and they are volunteers.
So they don't commit to us on certain dates and times, but when they are able to log in and put a unit into the system, we log them into the system and they help us.
We do have some volunteer agencies that are tremendous and are consistently running units like our Central Park volunteers.
You know, we very consistently can count on Central Park volunteers to be in service and available and handling calls that occur within that Central Park area.
Okay.
And in what circumstances can a hospital divert certain types of ambulance patients?
So when a hospital requests a diversion, we send an EMS officer over to evaluate what is going on over at the hospital and the reason why they need to do.
And there are many reasons why a hospital can ask for a diversion.
It could be a utilities or infrastructure issue, such as power outage, computer IT issues.
It could also be that there are certain types of monitoring that needs to be done on certain types of patients.
So they could divert for cardiac patients because they have no more beds that have monitors.
Perhaps they can divert for a stroke patient because their CAT scan is not working.
So we work, as soon as a hospital advises us that they need to go on a diversion, we send an officer to evaluate what's going on, and we speak with the administrator on duty.
We also involve our Office of Medical Affairs.
Excuse me, to determine, you know, how long that this diversion and whether it needs to be a complete and total diversion, or do we just need to divert certain areas or certain patients that we are taking to the hospital?
Because maybe the general emergency room is open and operating, but L&D is having an issue.
So we would keep the hospital open for general emergency, but we wouldn't transport someone who is having a baby.