San Bernardino County Fire limits ambulance dispatches due to coronavirus surge
In some area communities a call to 9-1-1 doesn't mean an ambulance is coming. As coronavirus cases surge, San Bernardino County Fire will send paramedics to emergency calls but are making a big change.
News Channel 3’s Dani Romero has more on how they are now tackling calls.
Crew members of San Bernardino County Fire are ready to ride out into dangerous situations but the details of the call have never been more important.
“There’s all kinda of additional stressors on the job," said Chief Bob Evans.
The reason why San Bernardino County added a new policy on Sunday in an effort to prioritize ambulance services for the most serious calls.
“We’re withholding our advance life support ambulances from going to a low acuity calls so something like a tooth ace for example." said Chief Evans. "Even though the patient deems it to be an emergency, it truly is not life threatening. Then, we’re going to hold back ambulance until needed.”
With busy emergency rooms have meant paramedics are waiting up to 8 hours at a hospital before they could release a patient and then respond to their next call.
“We were reacting to higher surge in call volume and we had that. Now our call volume is on par with this time last year so thats not that problem but now we have an uptick in workforce health where that wasn’t a problem earlier," said Evans.
Chief Evans calls the new policy a moving target.
"Its up for review right now we’re probably looking at a few tweaks here and there.”
When a call comes in it takes 60 to 90 seconds for crews to respond but with safety measures in place it adds an additional 20 seconds.
We checked in with riverside county emergency management department to see if they were headed in the same direction.
“it's really going to depend on what we're seeing on a day by day hour by hour type basis," said Shane Reichardt, Senior Public Information Specialist for County of Riverside Emergency Management Department. "Right now we're definitely seeing that more and more people are becoming ill with COVID. But right now we're able to keep the staffing levels on our EMS providers. Our call volume is not reflecting the increase in COVID cases.”
