‘I’m declining the call’
By Eric Fleischauer, The Decatur Daily, Ala. | |
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
Two
After dispatching the call to the nearest ambulance -- First Response Unit 302 -- the first dispatcher worked with Montgomery.
"He don't even act like he's breathing," Montgomery told the dispatcher, according to a 911 transcript obtained through a public records request. "Oh God, he's white as a sheet."
The dispatcher confirmed her son's chest was not rising and falling.
"Do you want to do CPR?" the dispatcher asked.
"I don't even know if I can," said the mother, who has had several strokes and suffers from heart problems.
The dispatcher walked her through the procedure for giving chest compressions. "And do it 200 times hard and fast."
And Montgomery did. She counted out each compression to the dispatcher.
"Three, four, five, six ... ."
At the count of 50: "I can't do no more," although she did. "I'm a disabled person, too. Can you send an ambulance?"
That simple question was not as simple as Montgomery thought, the dispatcher was discovering.
At 10:45, six minutes after Montgomery called 911, Childers called the dispatcher.
What followed was a debate over whether Montgomery's
"Hey, listen, you guys just dropped a call on 302," Childers said. "I can't have them going out of the city."
"It's not out of the city," the dispatcher replied. "It's in the (police) jurisdiction."
A second dispatcher took over the call with Childers while the first one monitored Montgomery's efforts to save her son. Childers and the second dispatcher discussed whether Lee's
"According to my map, that address is still
"It's south of
"OK. So you're -- you're refusing --"
"I'm declining the call," Childers said at
Childers wrong
As it turned out,
At 10:49, a
An odd wrinkle in the drama is that despite Childers' refusal to respond to the call, the ambulance kept going. According to
At 10:46, while Childers was debating police jurisdictions with the dispatcher, his crew was on the
"On the tapes, there is no radio traffic of a First Response unit arriving or clearing from the
Asked whether his investigation indicated the radio silence was the result of a deliberate attempt by the crew not to receive instructions cancelling the run, McKelvey said he did not know.
"We were able to confirm the crew did show up," McKelvey said. "Normal procedure would have been for radio or (mobile data terminal) traffic indicating they pulled up on-scene. Why that didn't happen, I don't know."
Asked whether his crew turned off its radio, Childers said that would have violated company policy.
"Who said that?" Childers asked. "An employee said that? Who was it? That's very inaccurate. If I can't get the name of the employee, both crew members will be terminated. Then I can make sure I got the right one. But that is inaccurate."
The crew members did not respond to The Daily's efforts to contact them.
McKelvey filed a report of the incident with the state
"Basically the state said, since the crew did go on, there was no actual act that would have been a refusal of call," McKelvey said. "
Childers said the incident -- which resulted in an administrative action by McKelvey and a new set of regulations adopted by the EMS Committee -- was overblown.
"The crew continued on because obviously we want to put the patients first," Childers said. "As far as resolving it, First Response continued on to the call and was not needed once we got there. It's a dead issue as far as providing service."
More trouble
The tragic night was not quite over for Montgomery. Overwrought with emotion and struggling from the exertion of giving her son chest compressions, she began having chest pains. At 10:59, a
So instead of retrieving the First Response ambulance, the
Montgomery, looking last week at the room where her son died of congestive heart failure, wept. She has been doing that a lot lately.
"I can't get over it," she said. "I still have bad days. I just sit all day and cry."
For three weeks after her son's death, she stayed with relatives rather than return to her home. The memories -- sparked by the many pictures of her son,
"He was my oldest son," she said. "He was my rock. It's been hard, hard, hard."
She remembers her attempts to revive her son while trying to hear the dispatcher. Her younger son,
'It's just not right'
Montgomery doubts a faster ambulance response would have saved her son, but she tears up again as she contemplates the debate over police jurisdictions.
"They're fighting about whether they should come out and my son's here dying? It's just not right," Montgomery said.
"There's about 15 kids here," Montgomery said, gesturing out her window into the trailer park. "What if something happens to one of those kids? Are they going to lie there and die while the ambulances argue about whether they should come?"
After hearing of Childers' refusal to take the call, McKelvey investigated the matter. He ultimately drafted a rule, adopted by the EMS Committee in November, requiring any disputes about the propriety of an emergency call to be resolved after the ambulance has completed its response.
First Response was not penalized for declining the call. The EMS Committee has no enforcement authority. All it can do is recommend a suspension or revocation of an ambulance service's license to the
At least two-thirds of the 911 calls are dispatched to First Response, Welty said, because its more numerous ambulances usually are closer to the incident.
Dr.
Moving forward
"The ambulance has got to go," Sullivan said. "It is not appropriate for them to try to decide if it's appropriate for them to go or not go. They need to respond to the call, take good care of the patient and get them to the appropriate place to take care of them."
Neither the issue of whether the call is within the police jurisdiction, not the likelihood that the patient is uninsured, should affect the response, Sullivan said.
"You're going to have some where you make a decent profit and some where you're going to lose," Sullivan said. "They all know that. That's like me working in the emergency room. I treat people and I don't know the patient's names or whether they have insurance in extreme situations. I'm not going to walk out on somebody that's coding and make sure they have
Unless the
EMS Committee member
"It could take the form of fines or something else that will get their attention," Trammell said. "We're dealing with an aggressive bunch of business people that are trying to do the best that they can, and sometimes that gets out of hand."
Montgomery hopes something changes.
"This should never have happened," she said. "I don't want it to happen again to someone else."
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