Brookhaven petitions GA for ambulance service
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Mayor Park: “Time is up. People are dying.”
Brookhaven, GA, April 25, 2024 – A guest at a Brookhaven hotel suffered a drug overdose. The male displayed signs of excited delirium, profuse sweating, incoherent speech, and hallucinations. Brookhaven police requested an ambulance. It took 41 minutes to arrive.
Police responded to a fight at the Look Cinemas on Town Boulevard where someone discharged pepper spray and contaminated several people. Another suffered a broken arm. An ambulance was requested but took so long to respond that the injured victims left before help arrived 52 minutes later.
A Brookhaven police officer was flagged down by someone having a diabetic episode and requested to go to the hospital. The officer called for an ambulance but was advised that there would be a long delay. The victim was updated, and he then requested to be dropped off at the closest train station so he could take himself to the hospital.
Police went to a Brookhaven residence where a woman was attacked by a dog inside her home. When police arrived, she was sitting on the steps covered in blood and her left arm ripped open in several places. After waiting more than 30 minutes for an ambulance to arrive, the officers drove her to Grady Hospital themselves.
Brookhaven police responded to Blackburn Park after hearing a call on the radio that a man was dying. Officers found the man in the park with a gunshot wound to his chest. The officers requested AMR, which arrived 34 minutes later. The victim died shortly after arriving to the hospital.
“This is no longer a matter of if someone is going to lose their life over DeKalb County’s lack of response. Now we are at a point where the question is how many more will have to die before Brookhaven can take this service over,” said Mayor John Park. “The time is up for DeKalb County to fix their ambulance problem.”
Currently DeKalb County contracts with a private company to provide emergency management (EMS) services. The contract oversight falls under the DeKalb County Fire & Rescue Department. Brookhaven officials have no authority or control of this essential public service. Over several years DeKalb County consistently fell short in EMS response times per their contract with their private vendor…and well short of comparable cities and national standards.
The Journal of Emergency Medical Services states, “No universally accepted response-time system requirement exists. However, in urban areas, the most widely used ambulance response-time standard is eight minutes and 59 seconds (8:59), with 90% compliance reliability measured on a fractile, not average, basis.”
On the local level, the EMS response goal in 2023 in Gwinnett County was 90 percent of all calls to arrive in seven minutes. In DeKalb County, the 90 percent EMS response goal in 2023 was 12 minutes. However, the DeKalb County EMS provider’s actual average response time in 2023 for those criteria was almost 20 minutes.”
“This isn’t the first time that Brookhaven has requested that State (The Georgia Department of Public Health-Emergency Medical Services) grant Brookhaven the authority to provide ambulance service. I have requested it twice before,” said City Manager Christian Sigman. “So, we are stepping up to the plate one more time, and hopefully the Department of Public Health will see that there is everything to gain and nothing to lose by giving Brookhaven the go-ahead.”
In an effort to reduce ambulance response times in Brookhaven and North DeKalb County, a joint announcement was made on the phase-in of operations of the new Emergency Medical Services (EMS) hub on Buford Highway in March 2020. The building was purchased and renovated for use by the City of Brookhaven and leased to Dekalb County at no cost. Notwithstanding the impact of Covid-19, EMS response times have not improved with the addition of this EMS hub.
The next meeting of the Georgia Department of Public Health-Emergency Medical Services/Region 3) is May 9.
