Lights and sirens: more hazardous than beneficial?

Tnaemt94

Tnaemt94

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One study was conducted in a small city and found that transporting with lights and sirens was only approx. 43 seconds faster than that without.

In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of ambulance related crashes using lights and sirens each year. Many of which are fatal.

Plus, think of this. We often respond emergency traffic to attend to one patient. If we create more injuries and fatalities along the way, haven't we defeated our purpose?
 
STXmedic

STXmedic

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Yes.
 
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DesertMedic66

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Yes.
 
MonkeyArrow

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Tnaemt94 said:
In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of ambulance related crashes using lights and sirens each year. Many of which are fatal.
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Where did you get that number from?
 
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Tnaemt94

Tnaemt94

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MonkeyArrow

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Tnaemt94 said:
"Between 1992-2011 there were an estimated annual mean of 1500 injury crashes involving an ambulance and 2600 injured persons* (includes ambulance occupants and occupants of all other vehicles involved)**."

So that is an average of 2600 people injured each year from ambulance crashes
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Again, not to take away from the point of the thread but those numbers should still be better contextualized. They are nowhere near the hundreds of thousands you claimed (barely thousands), nor were many of which fatal (well less than 1%). 59% came while in emergency mode, leaving about 1560 total injured persons a year due to ambulance crashes. However, this does not account for who is at fault in the accident, as there is still a pretty significant 40% accident-injury-nonemergency rate. Also, for the number of crashes, there are an average of 33 fatalities, again, similar to the 60/40 split emergency/non, respectively.
 
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gotbeerz001

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Sounds more like we are placing great responsibility with those who do not have the appropriate level of sound judgement to be safe.
When I drive Code 3, whether in an ambulance or a fire engine, I rarely feel as if I am pushing the rails of safety. However, in a dense urban area it would be impossible to arrive in any sort of timely fashion during certain times of the day without C3 capabilities.
 
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joshrunkle35

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Also, it should be added to note that this falsely equivocates that the lights and sirens are the cause of hazard, rather than the speed. You can still drive the same way, but have warning mechanisms on your vehicle.

It just seems to me like a lot of EMS "studies" aren't really that scientific, or applicable to the entirety of EMS.
 
NUEMT

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We should consider the level of training that EMS gets. It varies by state.. sometimes county or system. Sometimes company. Not everyone does EVOC....

Data from one small town study likely only benefits that town and towns of similar makeup and demographic. Did the study take into consideration the distance of the nearest medical facility....or how the numbers played in to pt outcomes?


Lights and sirens does not always have to mean fast either. Code here in chicago is little over 30 miles an hour on average. It just means we keep moving instead of sitting in traffic. I could see it meaning more in a smaller town.

The other thing to consider is if the decision is left up to the driver, do they have all of the info on whether or not to light it up? Who then carries the liability if the call not to take it emergent is wrong?
 
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johnrsemt

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Most places going to the scene the crew has no choice if they run L&S or not, but they do during transport to the hospital.
Does it save time? responding to the scene usually not, but depending how far your hospitals are it can. Out here we are 45-90 minutes from gate to Hospital, and I have ran over an hour to get to the front gate. L&S doesn't make any difference on traffic because there isn't much, but it does make a difference because we can then go up to 10 miles over the speed limit and on a 90-150 mile transport that is a difference.
 
Summit

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I found it interesting in China to watch ambulances run with L&S 100% of the time and nobody cared even a little to yield. No... they'd cut them off in traffic!
 
NUEMT

NUEMT

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  • You see the same thing in Doha and jordan. That is a cultural thing. Its just a conditioning thing since EMS is new in a lot of places still.
 
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Tnaemt94

Tnaemt94

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gotshirtz001 said:
Sounds more like we are placing great responsibility with those who do not have the appropriate level of sound judgement to be safe.
When I drive Code 3, whether in an ambulance or a fire engine, I rarely feel as if I am pushing the rails of safety. However, in a dense urban area it would be impossible to arrive in any sort of timely fashion during certain times of the day without C3 capabilities.
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Just think, only a mere fraction (I read one time 5%) of calls are true emergencies. Many of them aren't life threatening at all.

Driving emergency traffic places the general public at some risk obviously, especially when pertaining to intersections and entering opposing traffic.

For what? We get there to find no apparent threat. In the meantime, we just put others at risk

Then someone may turn around and say, "we never know if it is a true emergency until we get there, so it is best to respond C3 just in case." But you can also counter that and say, "you never know if you will get in an accident along the way, so it is best to travel the normal flow of traffic."

Except with one, the results can be more catastrophic than the other.

There is a saying,

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"
 
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gotbeerz001

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My point is that adrenaline and inexperience has much to do with the number of accidents we see in EMS. I am an advocate for improving skills, not limiting tools.
 
captaindepth

captaindepth

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Here is a kind of follow up question,

So we have a BLS fire dept. that usually (at least 75% of the time) gets on scene before the ambulance. It seems like the fire dept. continues to have the ambulance respond emergently when there is no reason to, whether it be a minor medical complaint or minor MVA. For example we responded emergently, for a minor two vehicle accident (rear ended truck vs truck on a side street), from across the city only to do a refusal for arm pain. Why didn't the fire dept. slow the ambulance down to non emergent? This type of situation happens ALL THE TIME! Shouldn't they understand what an appropriate response mode is? Does anyone else deal with this kind of situation?
 
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DesertMedic66

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captaindepth said:
Here is a kind of follow up question,

So we have a BLS fire dept. that usually (at least 75% of the time) gets on scene before the ambulance. It seems like the fire dept. continues to have the ambulance respond emergently when there is no reason to, whether it be a minor medical complaint or minor MVA. For example we responded emergently, for a minor two vehicle accident (rear ended truck vs truck on a side street), from across the city only to do a refusal for arm pain. Why didn't the fire dept. slow the ambulance down to non emergent? This type of situation happens ALL THE TIME! Shouldn't they understand what an appropriate response mode is? Does anyone else deal with this kind of situation?
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Yep. We have responded with lights and siren when the fire department (also ALS) is getting an AMA. For lift assists (fire does them) they will be on scene and then determine the patient needs to go to the hospital and will request us lights and siren.
 
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