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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.
Alternatively, we could have a US system, where the ambulance won't set off unless your insurance covers it, or won't take you to the nearest hospital because that is not "in network".
Or, they'll take you to the hospital, unconscious, and then stick you with the bill because the trip wasn't "pre-approved".
This has nothing to do with socialised care and everything to do with bureaucrats making decisions that affect people - it's is not exclusive to socialised medicine. Regardless of how you slice it, ambulances and ambulance crews are a finite resource and priorities have to be set. They should not be set by non-medical people though, as in this case which was clearly wrong, and in the case of a lot of medical decisions under the US system (where your insurance company, and not a doctor, decides the care you receive).
I'll take the NHS any day.
Just replying so that people know not to take your post literally. Ambulances in the US will take you to the nearest hospital with appropriate facilities for your condition.
A friend of my dad's garage had been broken into several times. One night he heard the guy breaking in and called the cops. The dispatcher said nobody was available right then and he'd have to wait. He hung up the phone, waited a minute and then called back and said "You can take your time, I shot him." and hangs up.
A minute later 3 cop cars come screaming up and catch the thief trying to run out the garage. The cops talked to the homeowner and said "We heard that you'd shot him."
He responded "And I heard there was nobody available!"
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And yet, the 'rationed' socialist healthcare here in Britain is still a metric fuckton better than what you get in the US
How strange. When I was living in the UK there always seemed to be some kid on TV looking for money to pay for them to fly to America to get treatment which they couldn't get under the rationed socialist NHS.
While I was a student there were two cases of someone in my group of a dozen friends having a serious medical problem and being told that there weren't resources in American hospitals, despite their good health insurance, to treat them promptly enough to prevent permanent disability. Both went to India and received immediate care that successfully fixed their problems and despite the fact that they had to pay 100% of the cost of surgery, the total cost including airfare was thousands less than their share of the cost for the same procedures under their health plans. Here near the northern border of the US I know someone who goes to Canada to get treatment unavailable under the rationed capitalist American system.
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While I was a student there were two cases of someone in my group of a dozen friends having a serious medical problem and being told that there weren't resources in American hospitals, despite their good health insurance, to treat them promptly enough to prevent permanent disability. Both went to India and received immediate care that successfully fixed their problems
As a medical student I may be a bit idealistic, but AFAIK this sort of thing should not be possible for about half a dozen reasons. What sort of illness did your friends have, and why was no doctor in the whole country willing to treat it?
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."
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Because there were two things which went wrong:
1) falls from over six foot were deemed to not be that serious but also
2) a computer error (in program or configuration) caused that to override anything else.
That is, under the decisions made by the bureaucracy the rules should have said:
1) if someone has fallen from a great height it is a type A (highest class) emergency
2) if someone has fallen from a moderate height it is a class B emergency unless there is something else which elevates it to a class A
3) if someone has fallen from ground level (slipped or tripped), it is a class B emergency unless there is something else which elevates it to class A
4) if someone is having trouble breathing, it is a class A emergency
5) is someone is bleeding profusely, it is a class A emergency
(etc).
The rules as implemented by the system actually effectively said:
1) if someone has fallen from a great height it is a type A (highest class) emergency
2) if someone has fallen from a moderate height it is a class B emergency
3) if someone has fallen from ground level (slipped or tripped), it is a class B emergency unless there is something else which elevates it to class A
4) if someone is having trouble breathing, it is a class A emergency
5) is someone is bleeding profusely, it is a class A emergency
(etc).
Note the shortened version of rule 2 and why this is relevant: moderate falls were being categorized as class B even when there were other risk factors. In the example case, we had an ambulance which was on its way to treat a woman who had fallen a moderate height and was bleeding profusely. It was diverted to instead help a woman who had slipped and fallen and was having trouble breathing because the first was classified as urgency level B and the first as urgency level A. This is clearly an error in either the software code, configuration, or the use of the program (most likely the configuration, I would guess, but that's just speculation on my part).
The committee's decision was that moderate falls shouldn't automatically elevate to class A. In practice, the system was assuming that moderate falls always were class B. So something was going wrong with the program, its configuration, or its use.