Emergency medical services also locally known as a paramedic service, a first aid squad,emergency squad,rescue squad,ambulance squad,ambulance service,
emergency telephone number is primarily important which puts people in contact with a control facility, which will then dispatch a suitable resource to deal with the situation.
The emergency medical service provides appropriate and timely interventions to treat the patient at the scene of the incident. It loads the patient in to suitable transport and continue to provide appropriate medical care throughout the journey. The patient is handed over to an appropriate care setting, such as the emergency department at a hospital, in to the care of physicians.
Emergency care is required to preserve life,prevent further injury and to promote recovery.
Timely assistance and quick transfer of the patient is required in an emergency situation. The first few minutes are very critical in saving life.
For taking quick action , the standby person with the patient should have access to the emergency telephone number of nearest hospitals. In the situation of panic, where the standby is checking responses of the patient, he searches for emergency ambulance number. Which sometimes are not updated and are old numbers and in this tense situation the caretaker\standby of the patient searches from one Google page to the other to find emergency ambulance numbers so that they can transfer the patient from the site to the nearest hospital. Meanwhile the patient ‘s condition starts deteriorating adding to the panic of standbys. Multiple calls , asking for the ambulance service are made, and after half and hour or so, we finally get number of the concerned driver who is bringing the ambulance.
The action implementation is finally been initiated and the ambulance reaches the target place after roughly one hour of hassle suffered by the stand by person.
Some more time is wasted in the traffic . But the ambulance finally reaches the hospital by skipping red lights and displaying emergency sound and dipper red bulb on the top of the ambulance.
Delay in implementation of services is because of- Lack of proper communication between hospital emergency staff and emergency ambulance drivers.
-difficulty in finding the hot line numbers of nearby hospitals displayed at one place on Internet or in any application.
– traffic on roads and insensitive traffic rule followers made specially for easy escape of ambulance to the target place.
To rectify these problems Ambulance service hot line numbers should be made available such that quick access can be made to the phone numbers and early action taken. Internet and latest applications can be of great help in displaying these numbers and making these numbers available in a proper format , which shall save the search time immensely. If the search time is reduced , less panic and reassurance is felt that action will be taken early. Lot of lives can be saved. And the hospitals that are just few minutes away will actually seem a few minutes away if things are implemented properly.
Compiled and written by
Dr Divya Gaur
Senior Physio