Scary! What's going on with Emergency services?

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network_engineer
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Scary! What's going on with Emergency services?

Post by network_engineer » Thu Sep 06, 2018 4:37 pm

Hi all,

Long story short!

Okay, so I was in Sörnäinen walking towards Hakaniemi, around 12.30 daytime, when this large 6-ft-ish stumbled on the road real bad, and I mean, real bad. He already had a couple of cuts across his face, bleeding profusely. Some people stepped into help, most figured he was drunk or so. But then, he was vocal enough to say that he can think and speak clear, just that his muscles won't hold up (yeah, I speak Finnish). I got him a bottle of water to wash up, and people could not hold on to him - real large guy! At one point, he stumbled *hard* from the pavement towards the road itself, couple of us signalled to the oncoming buses to go slow. His statement was that he was at the bar, and somebody slipped something into his drink. No idea! But he was talking fairly clear. But his hands and legs were like water.

Here's what got me: Even I called the emergency services. And yes, I have the 112 Suomi app on the phone, which also gives the precise location to the services.

Guess what: It took over a minute for the call to be answered!

And then having explained that this guy may get run over, and we need an ambulance, the response was very non-chalant. There'll be an ambulance when one becomes available! Again, what?

A few of us stayed on to help and monitor the guy, but we were there about 10 min. Eventually, he kinda wobbled up, and tried to walk, and then somebody help him along to his house.

So, come again: What was this about? Has there been some changes to the emergency services? No response for like 1 min.??? The ambulance will be there when it is possible??? I know there was some chat about consolidating the response centres, but this?



Scary! What's going on with Emergency services?

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wolf80
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Re: Scary! What's going on with Emergency services?

Post by wolf80 » Fri Sep 07, 2018 12:03 pm

I don't see the issue here at all.

Emergency vehicles are dispatched as per availability and assessment of case.

A one minute answer time on an emergency line is not good but can happen during peak hours. I am sure they have internal guidelines on the percentage of cases that has to be answered within a certain time. On a side note - when waiting for somebody to answer the emergency line, already 20 seconds can feel like a minute.

The patient had minor injuries (small cuts, minor bleeding), and was intoxicated. Therefore this is a low priority case for the ambulance service. More than 10 minutes times for an ambulance to arrive is completely normal. I'm not sure what the times are in Finland, but many countries have guidelines of 6-10 minutes for emergency personnel to reach a high-priority case. (= life threatening situation, such as loss of consciousness, heart attack, polytrauma, severe blood loss, etc.)

The patient might self-harm himself due to intoxication. That might justify a police car to be dispatched, but then again, this kind of case is daily business in Helsinki/Finnland. I can assure you the police will not dispatch a car to every intoxicated person who might fall onto the street.

The statement from the patient that somebody slipped sth into his drink is a serious one, and should be taken into consideration when assessing the case, the question is if it has been communicated to the emergency services. Also to be taken into account is the fact that this is sometimes used as an excuse by intoxicated people, and then might not be taken as serious as it should be.

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network_engineer
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Re: Scary! What's going on with Emergency services?

Post by network_engineer » Mon Sep 10, 2018 4:57 pm

Yeah! I guess I see what you are saying! Perhaps, the scariest part for me is not the triaging, but the call answering time, i.e. 1 min! Nope, it was not 20 seconds, I am pretty sure about that. Especially, since some of us were also watching the traffic lights for oncoming traffic, it was a good 1 min. and over, maybe 1 min. 7 seconds or so.

Well, I don't know what happended at the end of it all. But I do that the pavement was awash with blood. Face, shirt, trousers, dark and bloody. So, I am not sure if it was a minor cut.

Well, I hope he survived! But being a diabetic myself... I really wonder if this is the quality one can expect! :? Of course, I also know that Sörnäinen is supposed to be a "hot spot" for such issues... but still!

onlyforgame
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Re: Scary! What's going on with Emergency services?

Post by onlyforgame » Tue Sep 11, 2018 9:35 pm

I know right?! I have encountered 2 incidents regarding this so called emergency service in Finland. It's !"#¤%!

The first time was at a restaurant when an elderly lady stumbled and fell. Her face went straight to the edge of the table right in front of her. I was frown by seeing her lying there. The worse part was that it took probably forever for the emergence car to arrive :(. We were freaking scared and did not what to do. We dared not to move her since we were not sure if her neck was ok or not. So yeah sue was lying there on the floor in the winter time for about 20, 30 mins.

The second time was when my ex-bf's mom was vomitting blood. She had throat cancer and a part of her throat was removed and replaced by a tube so she could breathe. And it was bleeding all the time and sometimes when too much blood it could cause her suffocate. So I called the ambulance and they kept asking questions slowly slowly and I got out of my mind and shouted at them. Jeeze until now when i think about it my blood boils again.

I don't know guys. But they have helicopter ambulances though.

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wolf80
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Re: Scary! What's going on with Emergency services?

Post by wolf80 » Sat Sep 15, 2018 5:20 pm

1. You get what you pay for. If people would be prepared to pay higher taxes, there would be more ambulances. But people are not, so the ambulance service needs to prioritize cases and dispatch available ambulances as per priority.

2. It's hard to say as I was not there, but both cases described seem normal. Hitting your head and being conscious is not the highest priority. That's simply how it is. Again, higher taxes mean more ambulances, means cases with lower priority get treated faster.

3. The emergency response center people are not asking these questions for pure fun. Just because you do not understand the reasons behind them, does not mean there are none. This is highly trained personnel who has to keep calm under any kind of stress, and still get all the information from the caller to evaluate the case, and organize the dispatch of the according help as per priority of case and availability.

4. People always think that helicopters are the fastest means of emergency transport, but that is not always correct. In city centers, there are often very limited landing places, so the patient would need to be taken by ambulance to the helicopter and then to the hospital - that takes longer than just by ambulance and puts more stress on the patient. It depends a lot on the specific location if it makes sense to use a helicopter. And again, helicopters are held back for high priority cases.

5. A specific case might seem rather severe to a bystander, but is in fact not life-threatening, and can wait a bit. Also, a little blood can seem like a lot more than it actually is. You see that when you spill 100 ml orange juice on the floor, it soils half the room, but it actually wasn't a lot. Minor cuts are not life-threatening and can wait until treated later. Severe blood loss occurs when an artery or a major vein is damaged.

So, when you have an emergency, please stay calm, and explain as precise as possible what has occurred and your exact location to the emergency personnel on the line, answer the questions they ask, and trust that they will do everything possible to help.

If you are unhappy with the number of available emergency personnel and vehicles, please petition your local community to raise the community tax and use the additional money for the emergency services.

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Re: Scary! What's going on with Emergency services?

Post by network_engineer » Thu Sep 20, 2018 3:50 pm

wolf80, I might tend to agree. The services might be triaged better, but how would they know the emergency if the answering time itself is bonkers! But you are right on a number of counts, and perhaps, the bystanders might perceive things more serious than those in the emergency response system.
wolf80 wrote:
Sat Sep 15, 2018 5:20 pm
1. You get what you pay for. If people would be prepared to pay higher taxes, there would be more ambulances. But people are not, so the ambulance service needs to prioritize cases and dispatch available ambulances as per priority.

If you are unhappy with the number of available emergency personnel and vehicles, please petition your local community to raise the community tax and use the additional money for the emergency services.
This I tend to see otherwise. Why am I saying this?

Been here since 2000, and all the way up until maybe 2005, have lived in Espoo, Nurmijärvi, and now Vantaa. Worked in Helsinki and Espoo. The services were quite okay. It has rapidly, rapidly declined. Yet taxes have gone up.

My own experience? For the past three weeks, I have been calling the Koivukylän terveyskeskus to book an appointment with the nurse, just to get the regular shot (every 3 months), takes three minutes, since I take the injection with me. Just stick it in :twisted: .

On an average, while calling, I have been holding on for ~13-20 min without a response. Also, activated the request for a call back. Nothing until today. Went there in person in the middle of the day. Spent an hour+ queing there! The line does not move, just hangs there. Finally, I went to the office! They said too many nurses are away! They cannot add me the callback queue, they cannot book the time! I asked them what their role was about?

So, how does the citizen use the health care services that they have paid for, IF

a) the phones are not answered,
b) if the callback does not work, and
c) if there is no route to the doctor, except that you wait till the closing time and come again next day? Finland? Really?

For sure, I will escalate the issue.

A friend for a similar issue was advised to try the private healthcare services, or the työterveys, it would be only around 30 EUR. His snide reply was: Why am I then paying your bloody salary with my taxes?

To make the point:
If control of resources (financial, and labour) would have solved the problem, then communist countries would be paradise, wouldn't they? My own take on this is that the newer and rather current generation of workers, have followed the nations leadership and the quality has declined by a mile. The whole system of a great concern. How could I word this better? Their egos are writing cheques, they brains cannot encash! I am personally not sure if this is a tax issue. Taxes have risen.

So, no. I think
a) the goverment and the leadership needs to be reviewed. Too many people in the parliament on petty issues. Divisive politics. Wasn't there a saying along the lines of Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burnt?
b) Remove these useless roles, digitalise it. All private healthcare providers provide time booking online? Why is the normal healthcare a "special child".
c) Train the previously removed roles into more medical care staff.

That's what I'd say.

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Re: Scary! What's going on with Emergency services?

Post by Upphew » Fri Sep 21, 2018 9:29 am

There was a news piece about slow response of 112 some days ago. I was going to link it here, but got distracted. Il or Is. While I tried to find it from ampparit I stumbled upon this: https://www.lansivayla.fi/artikkeli/702 ... u-turhaksi summary: Summer of 2017, 6900 calls per day. Summer of 2018 12200 calls per day. Might answer why the 112 doesn't pick up after first ring.
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rinso
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Re: Scary! What's going on with Emergency services?

Post by rinso » Fri Sep 21, 2018 10:47 am

Summer of 2017, 6900 calls per day. Summer of 2018 12200 calls per day.
Now my question is; "Has the number of incidents doubled, or is the threshold to call for help lowered significantly?"
If it is the later, it is no wonder the 112 operators starts treating calls with less urgency.

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Re: Scary! What's going on with Emergency services?

Post by Upphew » Fri Sep 21, 2018 11:28 am

rinso wrote:
Fri Sep 21, 2018 10:47 am
Summer of 2017, 6900 calls per day. Summer of 2018 12200 calls per day.
Now my question is; "Has the number of incidents doubled, or is the threshold to call for help lowered significantly?"
If it is the later, it is no wonder the 112 operators starts treating calls with less urgency.
The article says 1,3M calls Jan-Jun, 291000 calls were such as they shouldn't have been put to 112. So quite a lot imho. I would blame at least partly that there aren't easy numbers anymore for police or fire department.
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network_engineer
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Re: Scary! What's going on with Emergency services?

Post by network_engineer » Fri Sep 21, 2018 6:13 pm

About the work load/ number of calls:
Has anybody tried the 112 Suomi app? I have it, and when calling the emergency, it is supposed to also transmit the location. I fail to understand though how it is done, since the call itself is a GSM CS call (circuit-switched, i.e. normal phone call). I don't recollect a GSM CS call being able to transmit the location details. Of course, it could be that the app initiates the call, and then sends the location and the MSISDN using the data service, and the emergency services are able to correlate the call with the data at their end. Who knows!

Either ways, the point is that with the location services, it should in fact reduce the burden on the emergency response to locate the call.

But to answer the question: I know that they have centralised the services, that should also mean that all the previous operators are just working unified - unless they have also ramped down the personnel.

I am not a conspiracy theorist, and without any insinuation :twisted: I wonder if the initial service response time would be the same irrespective of the location where the call is coming from. If anybody calls, e.g. from next to the parliament building, would it still take a minute to answer the call? If not, then the location services is actually doing more harm than good.


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