Emergency Medical Dispatching (EMD)

It has long been believed that emergency medical care begins when the pre-hospital care providers arrive at the scene. However, when EMDs are properly trained and equipped, emergency medical care can begin the moment the dispatcher answers the phone. This makes properly trained and equipped EMDs a critical link in the EMS chain of patient care. 

VPSCC is currently a member agency of International Academy Emergency Medical Dispatch (IAEMD) and is working toward national accreditation.  National Academy’s EMD protocols are followed on all medical calls that come into our center.

For many years the EMS dispatcher was without a system to ensure accurate decision making based on sound medical principles. Historically, the interrogations conducted by these ill-equipped medical dispatchers resulted in subjective evaluations of the pre-hospital responses required for each call. Inconsistencies in medical dispatch policies, procedures, and practices have led to major legal disasters that could easily have been avoided if the dispatchers had been provided with the training and protocol tools necessary to perform their job properly.
One of the primary purposes of the MPDS protocols is to enable EMDs to determine the appropriate response to send to a given emergency. The protocols help EMDs quickly obtain the patient status and scene information necessary to determine the appropriate dispatch determinant code. The EMD then sends the response configuration that has been assigned to the code by local medical and EMS control. In short, the MPDS helps dispatchers send the right thing, at the right time, in the right way.

In several implementation studies of agencies with both BLS and ALS capabilities, the MPDS reduced the number of ALS responses by 30 percent. The MPDS also produced commensurate decreases in emergency medical vehicle accidents and unit maintenance costs. This happens because the MPDS protocols enable EMDs to make safe response choice decisions based on well-established medical principles, as opposed to making dangerous decisions based on subjective, unstructured interrogations.

Another primary purpose of the MPDS is to enable EMDs to assist callers in aiding the patient prior to on-scene arrival of field personnel. This is accomplished through uniform, medically approved, DLS protocols. All of the MPDS DLS protocols meet or exceed the international standards for emergency medical dispatching.

For more information on our EMD protocols, follow the link EMD on the left side of this page.