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Flaw In Emergency Response System May Have Killed Hundreds
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that a flaw in the way emergency response software was set up to handle Category A responses in Great Britain may have cost hundreds of lives over the past ten years. Most ambulance services use an international computerized system designed in America and in the US version, a fall of more than 6 feet receives the maximum priority response. However, the government committee which governs its use in Great Britain decided that such cases should be deemed less urgent, and excluded from an eight minute category A target response time. If a call involved a fall of more than 6 feet it was designated a lower priority 'category B response' despite the presence of life-threatening conditions which were supposed to receive the most urgent category A response. The flaw came to light after Bonnie Mason, 58, fell 12 feet down the stairs and died from a head injury after emergency controllers in Suffolk failed to identify her situation as 'life-threatening.'"
The system itself wasn't flawed, but rather whoever set it up decided that they should be category B. The system did exactly what it was told, it just was told to do something different than in the US, and something that was later deemed to be suboptimal.
How is this a flaw in the Emergency Response System if the change initiated by a government committee is how the incidents were classified wrongly?
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It seems that the software downgraded to category B if the fall was larger than 6 feet regardless of other (category A) factors.
e.g., the patient has been shot and stabbed and drowned and fell 8 feet so it's a category B now.
That is a fault in the software.
I think that the comments I have read above me are missing the point, or maybe I am.
The software was changed so that falls of more than 6 feet no longer caused a case to be considered "category A", the problem is that (through a mistake when rewriting that bit of code I assume), mention of a fall was causing a case to be considered "category B" even if other things were present that would normally have made it "category A".
The point is this: the software was written in the USA, and it murdered peaceful and enlightened Europeans.
The point is actually this: the software was written in the USA, but the Europeans had to go and dick with it thereby murdering the people that elected the retards who decided to perform the aforementioned dickery.
Clearly the coders or whoever set it up that way fucked up. And you had me until the anti-government rant. Driving any vehicle at high speeds comes with danger so there are good reasons to lower the category. (Hong Kong has only 1 category and stats show that this is a shitty plan). Likely that they modified the system based on new information, incredibly well-established facts aren't always true.
UK - "The most critical emergency calls, referred to as "Category A" calls, have a response time requirement of eight minutes and zero seconds, with a 75% compliance requirement, and the additional stipulation that 95% of these calls must be reached within 14 minutes in urban areas and 19 minutes in rural areas. "
US - "For life-threatening emer-gencies, providing a transport-capable unit within 8:59 with 90% reliability is the most common urban benchmark. Common rural and wilderness benchmarks are within 15/90% and 30/90%, respectively."
So, comparatively the two countries are similar in numbers. UK is arguably a bit behind, but if you've ever been to both cities it is obvious why. The US was designed for cars, the UK for people or carriages in many parts. In any-case it is insulting to say that they are behind due to government negligence. And this is just talking about ambulance response times, in many other metrics the UK is far far ahead with their socialized healthcare. So please refrain from the rhetoric. I think we can all agree we have enough of that already.
How strange. When I turn on the television, there always seems to be some American family who lost their house, had to declare bankruptcy and move in with friends or family after their greedy, captialist insurance provider dropped them because of a "pre-existing medical condition."