BMJ 2002;325:1299 ( 30 November )

Letters

Emergency response to 999 calls

    Alternatives to the emergency 999 response can be seen in Europe
    Safe and reliable alternatives are needed
    Ambulance service is weakest link

Alternatives to the emergency 999 response can be seen in Europe

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR---Snooks et al point out that the current 999 emergency response system has problems: increasing demand from the public and ever shorter response time targets.1 They find a lack of evidence on alternative systems and responses in the English medical literature. By restricting their search, they overlook live examples only a few miles from these shores.

France, since the mid-1960s, has had a system which incorporates many of the alternatives quoted by the authors: the Service d'Aide Medical Urgente (SAMU).2 Calls to the control room are logged by trained telephone operators and then passed on to a "medical dispatcher": a doctor in emergency medicine, trained by the service. Medical dispatchers may simply provide medical advice to the caller, or they may decide to use one of a range of other responses to a call. These are referral to, or the dispatch of, a primary care doctor; arranging non-urgent transport . . . [Full text of this article]
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Relevant Article

NHS emergency response to 999 calls: alternatives for cases that are neither life threatening nor serious
Helen Snooks, Susan Williams, Robert Crouch, Theresa Foster, Chris Hartley-Sharpe, and Jeremy Dale
BMJ 2002 325: 330-333. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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