Falls are one of the most common types of complaints received by 9-1-1 emergency medical dispatch centers. They can be accidental or may be caused by underlying medical problems. Though not alert” falls patients with severe outcomes mostly are “hot” transported to the hospital, some of these cases may be due to other acute medical events (cardiac, respiratory, circulatory, or neurological), which may not always be apparent to the emergency medical dispatcher (EMD) during call processing.

The objective of this study was to characterize the risk of cardiac arrest and “hot-transport” outcomes in patients with “not alert” condition, within the Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS®) Falls protocol descriptors.

This retrospective study used 129 months of de-identified, aggregate, dispatch datasets from three US emergency communication centers. The communication centers used the Medical Priority Dispatch System version 11.3–OMEGA type (released in 2006) to interrogate Emergency Medical System callers, select dispatch codes assigned to various response configurations, and provide pre-arrival instructions. The distribution of cases and percentages of cardiac arrest and hot-transport outcomes, categorized by MPDS® code, was profiled. Assessment of the association between MPDS® Delta-level 3 (D-3) “not alert” condition and cardiac arrest and hot-transport outcomes then followed.

Overall, patients within the D-3 and D-2 “long fall” conditions had the highest proportions (compared to the other determinants in the “falls” protocol) of cardiac arrest and hot-transport outcomes, respectively. “Not alert” condition was associated significantly with cardiac arrest and hot-transport outcomes (p < 0.001).

The “not alert” determinant within the MPDS® “fall” protocol was associated significantly with severe outcomes for short falls (<6 feet; 2 meters) and ground-level falls. As reported to 9-1-1, the complaint of a “fall” may include the presence of underlying conditions that go beyond the obvious traumatic injuries caused by the fall itself.

A common chief complaint to emergency dispatch communication centers worldwide is “breathing problems”. The chief complaint of breathing problems represents a wide spectrum of underlying diseases, patient conditions, and onset types. The current debate is on the potential ability of a dispatch protocol to safely and with high specificity, differentiate patients with minor or non-critical conditions from those conditions that pose risk to the patient and require advanced life support evaluation and care. This issue also has extended into the paramedic prehospital evaluation realm.

The objective of this study was to describe the distribution of Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS) codes representing the spectrum of clinical descriptions within the breathing problems chief complaint and their associated outcomes, at the scene and during transport, as determined by [UK] paramedics.

A retrospective, one-year study (September 2005 to August 2006) of a de-identified aggregate dataset from the London Ambulance Service (LAS) Trust was evaluated. A profile of the distribution of calls, incidents, patients, and outcomes (cardiac arrest [CA] and blue-in [BI] high acuity i.e., patients transported with lights and siren based on paramedic protocol) for the breathing problems chief complaint was evaluated.Odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were used to quantify associations between the MPDS priority level's concurrent asthmatic conditions and outcomes. Two-sided Fisher's exact p-values were obtained to determine statistically significant associations, at a level of 0.05.

Sixteen percent (95,848/599,093) of all the patients were classified under the breathing problems chief complaint.Of these 95,848 patients,367 (0.38%) were CA outcomes, and 7.82% (n = 7,493) were BI outcomes.The Cardiac Arrest Quotient (i.e., the number of CA cases as a percentage of the number of patients) for the ECHO priority level was 46 times higher than was that of non-ECHO priority levels: DELTA and CHARLIE (17.05% vs. 0.37%). Asthmatics were associated with CA outcome (OR(95%CI): 0.60(0.47, 0.77), p <0.001), but not with BI outcome.

The MPDS coding yielded a richer mix of severe outcomes in the higher priority levels. The Severe Respiratory Distress coding had the greatest number of patients and severe outcomes. Future studies that help refine the Severe Respiratory Distress code in the MPDS by more specific subgroups of patients would be beneficial.