Ambulance CEO: Exact GPS coordinates of 911 caller were not shared the night she died
MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) -- Both Curtis Ambulance and Bell Ambulance will meet with the Milwaukee Fire Department Wednesday, Feb. 7 to review procedures for when a patient cannot be located on a 911 call.
We're now learning new information about what happened with the dispatch process the night 49-year-old Jolene Waldref called 911 but later died.
James Baker of Curtis Ambulance said improvements can be made to this system, and that he's learned new information about the incident.
Baker told us, "This is one that, in my experience, has not happened before."
But the situation exposed gaps in the emergency dispatch system that he and others want to fix.
Baker said Monday, "It came out after the fact that there was a GPS coordinate."
The GPS coordinate he's talking about was Waldref's exact location when she called 911 on Jan. 15.
But Baker said his Curtis Ambulance crew never got the coordinate that night, they were only told to respond to the intersection of 76th and Congress.
While canvassing the relatively large area from their ambulance, they never saw Waldref laying on the sidewalk.
At a news conference last week, Baker said, "Is a protocol change necessary? In this case, I don't think there is."
But this week he said it could have been a different outcome with new information.
Here's how Baker described the dispatch process:
The initial 911 call goes to MPD. That's when Waldref told a 911 dispatcher, "I can't breathe."
Baker said if it's a medical or fire call, it's handed off to fire dispatch, which can be heard later in Waldref's call.
And if the patient needs a basic life support ambulance, the call is then handed off to the private ambulance dispatcher, like Curtis Ambulance.
But Baker said critical information can be lost during the call transfers. "When the 911 dispatch center got the call, they had the GPS coordinates of the call. That information is not relayed via the computer-aided dispatch system that we have."
Baker told us GPS coordinates do not come across the computer screen. But a printer in the dispatch room transcribes each call for record-keeping purposes.
While investigating this incident, Baker said, "We found that on the typed response, we actually get a GPS coordinate."
It's one of several issues he expects to be hashed out Wednesday as part of a larger conversation. "How can we do this better? How can we prevent a reoccurrence? Is there something that we can put in place that would improve the patient outcome?"
Baker said his team has already made a change in that they'll check the typed call transcript for GPS coordinates of a caller if they cannot be located.
He also said this incident is sure to stick in the minds of EMS personnel for a while, and there will likely be extra care taken on calls like this in the future.