Preventable deaths following emergency medical dispatch--an audit study.

Background: Call taker triage of calls to the 112 emergency number, can be error prone because rapid decisions must be made based on limited information. Here we investigated the preventability and common characteristics of same-day deaths among patients who called 112 and were not assigned an ambulance with lights and sirens by the Emergency Medical Communication Centre (EMCC).

Methods: An audit was performed by an external panel of experienced prehospital consultant anaesthesiologists.

Implementing a nationwide criteria-based emergency medical dispatch system: a register-based follow-up study.

Background: A criteria-based nationwide Emergency Medical Dispatch (EMD) system was recently implemented in Denmark. We described the system and studied its ability to triage patients according to the severity of their condition by analysing hospital admission and case-fatality risks.

Methods: This was a register-based follow-up study of all 1-1-2 calls in a 6-month period that were triaged according to the Danish Index - the new criteria-based dispatch protocol.