When every second counts, emergency service personnel have found a way to provide more of them.

The Utah Valley Dispatch Special Service District handles calls from many of the communities in the county — about half the county’s population — including American Fork. The district’s records show that since January, the numbers of calls that were dispatched within 90 seconds has increased dramatically thanks to new measures dispatchers are using to get information and communicate it to emergency responders.

“People in Utah County should know they had a major increase in public service and it didn’t cost them a nickel,” American Fork fire chief Kriss Garcia said.

One of the key changes has been a pre-alert that dispatchers are using.

It’s a fairly simple concept. The call takers work in teams. One answers the call and determines if the emergency is fire or medical. They also get the location. That gets typed into the computer, which gives the information to the person’s partner. That individual sends a pre-alert to the appropriate department to prepare to respond to a call.

At that point, it’s not important to the department’s staff whether they will take a brush truck or a ladder truck to a fire. It doesn’t matter whether they are responding to a heart attack or a broken leg. What is important is that they have the initial information earlier so they can prepare to leave. In a volunteer department, responders have to get in their private vehicles and drive to the station before they can go on the call. In a full-time department, staff members need to put on their turn-out gear for firefighting. Those steps need to be taken, no matter the exact nature of the call.

Having those preparations made quickly enables the response team members to get to the scene more quickly, which can save lives and minimize property damage.

Spanish Fork public safety director Steve Adams said it was working well.

“We’re looking at just seconds truly in the improvement in how long it takes,” he said. “Seconds mean a great deal. If it’s a call where someone is not breathing, it only takes four minutes for a person’s brain to be damaged. If a dispatcher is giving that information out to the first responder, the chance of someone surviving a medical need increases. After eight minutes of not breathing, you have a biological death. Four minutes kills the brain, eight minutes kills the body. For fire responses, a fire doubles every minute. It’s very important to get the fire apparatus on scene and fighting it as soon as possible.

“I know the dispatch center is educating their dispatchers and telling them the need the responders have to get there on scene as fast they can.”

Garcia wrote about response times in the magazine “Fire Engineering.” He compared two hypothetical medical calls with differing results.

“The American Heart Association states that for every minute you delay defibrillation in a cardiac arrest, you decrease the patient’s survivability by 10 percent,” he wrote. “In the second department’s scenario, where rescuers arrived two minutes sooner, this translated into a potential 20 percent increase in the chance the patient would survive.”

He said the two dispatch offices had different approaches.

“The first department’s dispatch center focuses on sending the appropriate resources,” he wrote. “The second community focuses on sending the closest resource quickly.”

Deborah Mecham, the executive director of the Utah Valley Dispatch, said the program was helpful.

“By doing this we have improved the time in some cases by 50 percent,” she said. “That is really good.”

“We have set a target of being able to get the information and get the call dispatched within 60 seconds,” she said. “We are not getting that every time, but we are trying to do whatever we can to do that.”

The new system hasn’t removed all the difficulties.

“These calls are all emergency calls and they are not in their normal state of mind,” Mecham said. “Their emotional status impacts the ability to give what we need. The dispatchers are trained to break through the hysteria threshold. A lot of times they don’t even hear what you are saying.”

Sometimes people in distress can’t remember their address, or they may be in an unfamiliar location and not know the address. Perhaps a babysitter is calling for help and doesn’t know the address of the family. The enhanced 911 system usually tells the dispatcher where the individual is if that call is made from a landline. That is not always reliable, however, since some phones go through their computer and may not reflect the actual location of the call.

Cell phones create a different type of concern.

“An obstacle that we have faced is cell phones,” Mecham said. “With enhanced 911 the address shows up on the screen, but you could be anywhere with that cell phone.”

Dispatchers do have the technology to pick up the latitude and longitude coordinates of where a cell phone call is coming from, but it too is imperfect. The technology doesn’t translate the latitude and longitude into an address. Prior to May, the dispatchers or departments had to manually type those coordinates in to access street addresses. Not only did it require more time with the separate step, there was a greater chance of error.

“One number wrong in that big string of numbers and the opportunity for errors is there,” Mecham said.

Technology is helping them overcome that concern.

“We installed a new system,” she said. “With it we have a mapping program that automatically takes those numbers and gives us an address. It is not always spot on but usually it is close.”

“We would spend a lot of time on calls prior just trying to figure out where somebody was,” she said. “We have reduced that with this new system.”

Another concern is the risk of sending too much personnel, which increases the danger.

“Our argument about systems that process calls to send the appropriate level of care is that sending fewer units will save firefighters’ lives because responding to and returning from calls is the second leading cause of firefighter fatalities,” Garcia wrote in the article. “Responding to and returning from incidents are a large percentage of our injuries and fatalities, but it is not solely the fact that we are responding that these situations occur. These injuries and accidents generally occur because members are operating outside approved guidelines and policies. Most of these injuries and fatalities could be prevented if good training and education are in place and there is strict adherence to policies governing response.”

He also pointed that arriving on scene sooner does make for a safer response.

“Today’s fire loads and lightweight construction make any delay in dispatch a major element in firefighter safety,” Garcia wrote. “Many structural elements involved in fire will not hold the dead and live loads placed on them for more than a few minutes, so delay in dispatch could be disastrous for our firefighters.”

“Sending firefighters to a structure that is safer with a smaller fire should reinforce the need for a very rapid dispatch,” he wrote. “Imagine a crew making its way above a basement fire that has a lightweight floor system that will withstand direct fire impingement until collapse for three to five minutes. In a system aimed at quick response, this would absolutely make a difference in firefighter safety.”

While the personnel are preparing to leave the station, the dispatchers are getting — and sometimes giving — additional information. They find out more about a medical situation, such as the age of the victim and what symptoms are present. While the personnel are en route, dispatch transmits the additional information so they are prepared when they arrive.

Mecham said the dispatchers also give instructions to the person making the call.

“We ask even more and we give pre-arrival instructions,” she said. “A lot of times the dispatcher can save a life. For example, a mother calls and her baby is choking. The dispatcher gives the mother instructions how to dislodge the object and get the baby breathing again. The dispatcher can ask how old the baby is and the directions will be different based on that.”

Dispatcher April Robbins told about the process.

“When we take a medical call, a screen pops up and tells us what to say,” she said. “For any type of injury it gives first response questions and first aid information. We get the information that the ambulance wants to know as they are driving so they can administer help as fast as possible.”

The call takers and dispatchers sit in a room with subdued lighting to minimize distractions. They each have three or four computers and a radio for police calls. They generally have six or seven people on a shift at a time. There are eight regular positions and two more who do call taking.

They take about 350,000 calls a year, which translates into about 170,000 dispatches. Often they receive multiple calls for the same incident, such as a car accident reported by several people. When more than one unit is sent to a scene, such as several fire trucks or combination of fire and ambulance, it is counted as one dispatch.

The first nine months of this year, they had a higher rate than for the same period of 2011.

The dispatchers have about six months of training and then a three-month period of additional learning.

“It is quite an investment,” Robbins said. “It takes about nine months. We have to recertify every two years.”

Utah County isn’t always the easiest people to direct people around either.

“The hardest part when we get medicals is for our new people. It is hard to keep apart the cities,” she said. “Some cities contract with another city for law enforcement, like Cedar Hills. You have to know those connections.”

Being in her position has changed her personal life.

“I am a lot more careful about things,” she said. “I see things differently for everybody in my family. I am very careful about where I let my kids go. I am very emergency-oriented.”

Garcia, American Fork’s chief, said he was pleased with how the system was working.

“We had a call about a fire in a laundry room in the basement,” he said. “If it had been the extra minute or two time frame it would have been the whole house. Instead they had dinner at their home that night.”

He said the pre-alert was an efficient, effective way to improve service.

Mecham outlined future goals.

“Our goal is 60 seconds,” she said. “We are not getting that every time. We are trying to do whatever we can to do that. Everybody is watching our times and we have seen improvement since we started doing this. Our goal is to be able to do 90 percent of our calls within 60 seconds. Pre-alert has helped a great deal.”

Garcia predicted the responses would be even better.

“We will get much lower than the 90 seconds,” he said. “We will be much higher than the national standard. Ninety percent of the time it will be within 45 seconds.”

“There is nothing more important to us than a quick response time,” he said.

Another project which is expected to be put online soon is called HipLink. It includes a software program that would set off a pager, cell phone or text message indicating the address and type of emergency, which also would save precious seconds.

“We are building a database for that,” Mecham said. “We expect it to be put in around the end of November or first of December.”

“I feel like we have made significant improvement and I see more improvement coming,” she said. “What we are here for is to get help to those who need it. The faster we can get it there the more likely a good outcome is.”

Percentage of calls dispatched within 90 seconds

Before After

Medical 33 78

Fire alarms 21 51

Structure fires 33 70

Fire calls 30 50