911 calls from chronically ill drop after Milwaukee community initiative
jsonline.com
jsonline.com
7% of emergency calls made by 0.16% of people
4,288 of 62,763 emergency calls made by 100 people
As for care facilities, if the need isn't that common (e.g. once a week), is that really more effective than an occasional ambulance trip? Plus the patient might very well prefer to spend his last year as close to his family as possible.
If this is happening once a week then it really seems there ought to be a better way to handle it.
Edit: if you also assume that an ambulance dispatch is usually followed by an ER trip, the cost balloons even more. Seems really hard to think that a 911 dispatch followed by an ER trip once a week is the best way to handle a chronically ill person at home.
The BIG difference with what you've described though is the layout of the UK is much denser than USA. The resources available and the nature and frequency of call outs will obviously be quite different.
Home visits are great for physical therapy or protocol based care. But again, they call 911 when anything significant happens.
Ideally, emergency responders would be linked to the patient's healthy data so the verbal exchange via 911 is less necessary.
Or you should say something like 'of people who made emergency calls'
edit: that second one is still problematic since we only a couple data points on the distribution of calls per capita.
> Since there was also likely some underlying health condition, you would expect the between-year variance to be large. It might well be that their program has no effect whatsoever.
The rate dropped significantly each year from 2015 through 2017 -- 3 years in row. It's possible this is pure chance, but it seems rather unlikely.
One would hope that they're not doing that, and it's just that the article is imperfectly worded.
I worked as an EMT and would regularly get bizarre calls from people abusing the system to take their kid to the hospital because he hurt his arm, the parents following in tow by car. Or a domestic dispute where they think it's reasonable to call an ambulance like it's a less-serious police dispatch to handle more minor issues. Or really just a free taxi service in general. -- You don't have to pay if you just walk out of the hospital or ignore the collections. If you don't have insurance, it's pretty much the only option.
I'm not sure if there are any alternative medical models that solve the nature of some people to abuse shared resources.
Nobody has infinite access because the access is limited by human intervention. It's limited based on need, not available cash.
It's odd to me to think of the fire service giving first response medical care, outside of perhaps smoke inhalation and burns.
The entire system is based on counting the minutes from 911 call to treatment in the hospital, and treating it as a process to be optimized.
I think statistically, you need more medics than firemen, so it may make sense to think of the fire station as a paramedic station that's also equipped to fight fires.
My friend, the former EMT, told me that they like to have a crew of 4, for any call. The reason is that a large number of patients are obese, and it might take 4 crew to get someone out of their house. He said: "That's why you always see a fire truck following the ambulance."
Instead of paying them to twiddle their thumbs, most communities train them as paramedics and either have the fire department run an ambulance service or just use them as first responders who can get to a medical scene before an ambulance can.
Bigger paid departments have a split between engine companies and rescue companies. Rescue companies have fancy tools for all sorts of situations and usually have more trained medical capability. That’s why you’ll see ladder trucks dispatched to medical emergencies in the US.
However, I can only imagine that all developed countries have the “problem“ that modern building codes reduce the rate of fires such that they are faced with the choice between (1) reducing density of firefighters and therefore increasing their average response time (2) paying them to sit around and do nothing, or (3) giving them something else to do when there isn’t a fire.
I don't know how the distribution resembles wealth distribution; wealth distribution follows a power rule, because wealth is reflexive i.e. the more wealth, the faster the rate of wealth accumulation.