PURPOSE: Recently, the emergency medical information center has evolved into a new alternative institution providing emergency medical dispatching in Korea. The objective of this study is to analyze the recognition level of the emergency medical information center, the compliance of the emergency medical dispatch, and the accuracy of dispatching questions for appropriate triage. METHOD: A telephone survey of Gwangju citizens and a retrospective analysis of audio recordings of dispatcher-caller conversations collected by the Gwangju Emergency Medical Information Center for one year were conducted. RESULT: Of 105 respondents, only 21 (21.9%) were aware of the existence of the emergency medical information center and it's telephone number '1339' while 92 (87.6%) respondents were aware of 119, another emergency call number for ambulance service. Distributions of calls are as follows: The most frequent age was 0~9 (43.1%) years and the busiest hour was between 18:00 and 23:59. Also, most callers asked about abdominal pain (19.7%), high fever (10.9%), and injury (10.5%). The compliance of callers to dispatcher's recommendation, 'reassurance or self-care,' 'visit a physician's office,' 'use emergency room service,' 'immediately visit emergency medical center,' was 66.7%, 70.1%, 64.0%, and 92.6%, respectively. Overall, caller's compliance and satisfaction rate were 75.95% and 68.4%, respectively. Logistic regression models showed no significant association between the cardinal dispatcher questions and appropriate triage of trauma patients. CONCLUSION: The recognition level of the emergency medical information center was very low. This result indicates that some new strategies are needed to increase community knowledge and usage of the emergency medical information center. The utilization pattern of emergency medical information center was similar to that of emergency room. It is expected that non-urgent patients could be diverted from overcrowded emergency medical centers to other medical resources by improving the emergency medical information center. Lastly, if prehospital care is to be improved further, the dispatch protocol should be refined and revised with a comprehensive emergency medical system considered.
Abdominal Pain ; Ambulances ; Compliance* ; Surveys and Questionnaires ; Emergencies* ; Emergency Medical Service Communication Systems ; Emergency Medical Services ; Emergency Service, Hospital ; Fever ; Gwangju ; Humans ; Information Centers* ; Korea ; Logistic Models ; Retrospective Studies ; Telecommunications ; Telephone ; Triage