EMS Rotation, Not Closest Unit

The Baxter County (Ark.) 911 Center needs $17,000 to purchase software that would allow it to dispatch the closest ambulance to medical emergencies. Until then, dispatchers will manually track the location and activity of EMS units from Baxter Regional Med Center and Action Ambulance, and rotate between them when making assignments. OES director Tom Fischer told a reporter that Baxter would notify the Center each morning with the staging location for its ambulances and, and each time the ambulances are moved. “We will try to see if that will work to finding the closest units,” Fischer said. “We will have to depend on the existing software in our system and dispatchers looking on a map to try to make sure we get the closest (unit) to everybody until we get a locator system.” Read more here.