![]() These people were born, treated and died at Charity Hospital. We saw tons of people, some of whom had charts 3 feet thick. ![]() Then, when I was in my first year as an emergency medicine resident at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, I had a very personal experience dealing with a giant outpatient clinic. I made a recommendation that some better order to dispatch should be looked at in the future. In 1975, I did a thesis on ambulance response in Salt Lake City. I was an EMT at a BLS service in Salt Lake City, and I used that to pay my way through medical school. Where did you get your inspiration for protocols for dispatchers? Nobody was the wiser, except the dispatchers. If you were sending three units with lights and sirens on a cat bite, and five minutes later grandpa had a heart attack in the same area, he didn’t get help in time and he died. ![]() We also believed everything had to go lights and sirens, so the system was depleted and mismatched from the get-go. You learned to make the same mistakes that Nellie made. We called it ‘sitting with Nellie.’ You sat with your supervisor and learned how she did it. You had someone who was untrained, other than in-house orientations. They were at the lowest rung in the pecking order of public safety. Dispatchers were clerks they were remote. In the ’70s, we believed dispatch couldn’t figure anything out. What were people’s attitudes toward dispatch and dispatchers when you started in EMS? Clawson is also medical director and head of research, standards and academics at the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch, which develops standards of care and practice in EMS/public safety telecommunications, accredits 911 call centers, and offers training and continuing education for 911 communications specialists.Ĭlawson spoke with Best Practices about the evolution of 911 dispatch and where he sees dispatch headed in the future. Today, the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch protocols (the Medical, Fire and Police Priority Dispatch Systems) are used in nearly 3,000 EMS, 403 fire and 242 police call centers around the world.Ĭlawson is CEO/medical director of Priority Dispatch Corp., which develops and licenses the caller interrogation software (brand name: ProQA) that’s integrated into computer-aided dispatch (CAD) systems. Clawson became an emergency medicine physician and an advocate for dispatchers as a vital part of emergency response. ![]() Before he left, he would switch the phone to ring at the home of the husband and wife who owned the ambulance company.Ī thing or two has changed since then. In the 1970s, Clawson’s pioneering work in developing a system for interrogating 911 callers and giving prearrival instructions led to the transformation of dispatchers from “clerks” into professionals who send the right level of response to callers-and save lives.Īs an EMT in Salt Lake City in the late ’60s, Clawson’s first experience with medical dispatch went like this: An emergency call would come in to the ambulance station’s seven-digit phone number, he’d answer it, and then head out to respond. As the inventor of the Priority Dispatch System and co-founder of the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch, Jeff Clawson is widely known as the father of emergency medical dispatch. ![]()
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