![]() Some municipal contracts require private ambulance services to meet outdated response times, incentivizing the use of lights and sirens, experts said. In the case of ambulances, some medical services strive to meet response times based on studies from the 1970s, when devices such as automatic defibrillators were not widely available in public settings. The same risks identified in studies about ambulance responses apply generally to police and fire responses as well, though the dispatching criteria and cultures in those public safety disciplines can vary widely, experts said. “Killing nuns and children at crosswalks because you are running lights and sirens on a mouse bite doesn’t make any sense,” he said. Clawson said the overuse of lights and sirens posed a “public health dilemma.” A study of ambulance crashes by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that an average of 4,500 such accidents occurred annually from 1992 to 2011, resulting in an average of 33 deaths and injuries to 2,600 people each year.ĭr. Sirens can be useful in certain situations, such as getting through red lights or stop signs, but they can be harmful to responders, who can suffer premature hearing loss, and to patients, who can be stressed by the noise.Īnd then there is the risk of accidents. ![]() calls nationally from 2010 through 2015 was as high as 77.5 percent, according to a report he wrote. Yet, the average overall use of lights and sirens in E.M.S. in central Pennsylvania, noting that such responses are generally critical only in cardiac arrest calls. “Most of the things that are time-dependent are a very tiny minority of the E.M.S. Clawson, founder of the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch in Salt Lake City. ![]() When emergency medical responses were evaluated in Salt Lake City in the 1990s, the difference between “hot” calls (lights and sirens on) and “cold” ones (no lights or sirens) amounted to an average of 26 seconds, said Dr. ![]()
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