PEORIA, Ill. — The way Emergency Medical Services (EMS) calls are handled in Peoria could change.
A five year long study by the Missouri based company, Fitch and Associates, has been completed and the results were presented Tuesday night to the Peoria City Council.
The results indicated that Peoria Firefighter/Paramedics would not need to be dispatched to every EMS call.
City Manager, Patrick Urich, said the goal is to send the appropriate resources to the appropriate calls, as well as the right number of resources going to the appropriate calls.
“The entire genesis of this was we were sending too many resources to too many calls. Some of which were of low-severity that we didn’t need to have the fire department rolling up on and than AMT (Advanced Medical Transport) following up a minute and a half later,” Urich said.
Urich said this is an opportunity for the city to optimize the system for the benefit of the citizens.
Urich also mentioned that the Emergency Communication Center is undergoing reconstruction.
“We’ll have a brand new Emergency Communications Center by the end of this year,” Urich said.
Along with the reconstruction will be a transition from staff using physical cards to computer software that dispatchers will be trained on.
With the ECC and switching to software, more staff will need to be added.
“We need to continue to staff the center to fill the shortfalls that we have in staffing,” Urich said. “After that, we would be able to implement the recommendations on EMS protocols that are coming out of this study.”
Twelve additional dispatchers would need to be added to the staff.
The council did not vote on anything for the special Tuesday night. Council members will vote on the suggested EMS protocols at a later date.
