Nighttime Calls - search light?

[canuckfred]

Hi Everyone,
Just wondering if you can share how you normally find your call locations at night. Do you use a spot light to illuminate home address numbers? If not, how do you see the locations address numbers? Or do you forgo the spot light and rely only on GPS?
Thanks in advance.
Fred.

 

[DesertMedic66]

GPS, MapBooks, spotlights/flashlights, flood lights on the ambulance. We use a mix of all the equipment we have.

 

[mycrofft]

GPS can be like Lucy Brown and the football. She gets you moving, but the last segment can be embarrassingly unsupportive. Bring them all.

 

[mycrofft]

 

[Handsome Robb]

GPS, MapBooks, spotlights/flashlights, flood lights on the ambulance. We use a mix of all the equipment we have.

This. When I turn on the street I generally will kill the disco lights and pop the scene lights on. Our new units have a roof mounted, remote control spotlight thats really nice for addresses and the old units have a handheld spotlight in the cab.

 

[rmabrey]

GPS, MapBooks, spotlights/flashlights, flood lights on the ambulance. We use a mix of all the equipment we have.

This +Google maps showing me what the house looks like

 

[Handsome Robb]

This +Google maps showing me what the house looks like

Our responses are too short most of the time to ever use that but thats not a bad idea at all.

 

[mycrofft]

Have them stand in the front yard waving a lantern and yelling "Yoohoo".

Two points we had drilled into us: don't take off without knowing where you're headed, and find out fast.

 

[rmabrey]

Our responses are too short most of the time to ever use that but thats not a bad idea at all.

Depends on how the internet works that day if its useful or not. And for some reason depending on the laptop we are using, the picture of the house may or may not come up next to the map. Not sure what the issue is there but it always works in dispatch.

That is assuming dispatch has good directions and a description sometime within 5 minutes after you ask for them.

 

[AtlasFlyer]

The MDT shows call location on a map, and we've got a hand-held spotlight if we need it. I think I've used it once.

Generally speaking, the house numbers are easy enough to see. They may not be lit up and easy to see, but if you're looking hard you can find where you need to be.

 

[NomadicMedic]

I guess we're lucky. Our TriTech visicad maps us right to the house number 98% of the time. Of course, we have a county addressing department that does nothing but make sure county maps and the CAD is correct.

And we have a spot light and bright scene lights. There is a county ordinance that requires reflective house numbers. If we get really lost, we leave a flyer that reminds the homeowner of the ordinance and send an email to mapping to adjust it in the CAD.

 

[TransportJockey]

I'm lucky if houses in my two usual counties (in two different states) actually have street names or house numbers anywhere near them. But I use map books, spotlights, and my phones GPS. But GPS is more often than not wrong out here

 

[mycrofft]

Wouldn't it be cool if when a hospital sends someone home or a doctor has a pt who might likely need an EMS response, that they also send a two by two inch high reflective device or tape or something to affix to the house or roadside mailbox? Maybe two so there is a combo; "My house has the red and green reflectors on the lawn jockey".

I hated when the caller would either not know the address, or be rattled enough to give a previous address as the current one.

 

[Tigger]

Half the time there is a fire truck sitting in front of the house, so that makes it easy.

Other than that, scene lights and GPS. If we are really struggling to find something dispatch can count how many driveways the location is away from a landmark.

Our new ambulance was ordered with this on it, we'll see how that works. Apparently it is way brighter than anything else out there spotlight wise.

 

[mycrofft]

So they replace the lawn jockey or flamingo with a fire truck? Cool!

 

[WuLabsWuTecH]

Two points we had drilled into us: don't take off without knowing where you're headed, and find out fast.

Not always possible. With our run district as large at it is (about 200 sq miles) we're dispatched with either a village name or a township name. That way we know which way we're heading and the passenger can pull out the map book or the computer map and start looking for it. I've had a partner finish up a phone call or writing a run report for about 10 minutes before she would even start to look up the address! But with our long and skinny district, that could give her half an hour to spare!

We have a parcel map on our computer so we type in the numerics and it'll pop up with which parcels have those numerics. Usually there's only 5-10 of them so you can look at the street name and township/county to figure out which one it is. Hitting the line takes you to that parcel so you can say "it's going to the the 3rd house on the right after you make this turn, including the house on the corner" Street numbers are useless out here because 1) they are often not out on the mailbox (and the house may be a mile down the dirt road) and 2) the numbers don't go in order (you may have 10300, 10400, 10350 going down the line).

An yes, covering something like 5 towns and 4 townships can be challenging for dispatchers new to our area. Just today we got dispatched:

Disp: ...vehicle into a pole right in front of town hall, deputies have been notified.
Medic: Which town hall is this?
Disp: YOUR town hall
Medic: We cover 5 or 6 town halls that are almost an hour apart from each other, you're going to have to be more specific!

She ended up having to call the caller back because she had figured "town hall" would be a good enough description of where we were going!

 

[mycrofft]

Volunteer dispatchers too?
----------------------------------
OP, even a plug in xenon handheld flood can be useful, but if you get technical, be sure to keep things maintained and up to date. My THomas Bros will get me close even though it's eight years old, but Garmin will get me to the front steps IF I can get to the neighborhood.

 

[WuLabsWuTecH]

Volunteer dispatchers too?
----------------------------------

No, worse--Sheriff's Deputies! To be fair, the Sheriff's office has gotten a lot better since taking over dispatching about a year and a half ago, but they don't have any backup dispatchers. So any time one goes on vacation or is sick, their choices are to try and see if another dispatcher can cover or to pull a Deputy. Each Township has their own FD but we only have 3 EMS departments in the county. The other 2 are centered around 1 town and is generally where the deputies live/work. Ours is out in the middle of nowhere and we cover multiple counties and towns. They've been instructed to always give Fire/EMS runs a township (We have something like 6 main streets in our district) but when they give a location, they often don't go further than "the elementary school," or "town hall," or "village green."

Before budget cuts we actually had our own dispatcher and most of them were also members of the squad who did a shift or two a week part time as a dispatcher. They shared an office with PD. It was nice to have people that know how you operate and to know how your dispatcher operates. As a courtesy to the FD's we ran with, we also monitored firegrounds for them for something like a measly $1k a year.

But budget cuts caused them to consolidate dispatching centers so our dispatching center is now far, far away (I've actually never been to it, I just know it's about half an hour outside of us). Which unfortunately put dispatching into the hands of people who have no EMS training (it took us a year to get them to stop just calling injured person or ill person on everything, but they didn't understand BLS vs ALS and how a cardiac run would get ALS but an ill person gets BLS).

An unpleasant side effect is that they can't monitor our EMS Tac channel or our Firegrounds because they are too far away. So our choices are to use an unmonitored fireground (which we sometimes do for rescue incidents) or to use the main dispatch channel as our fireground (which is repeater-ed). Needless to say, if we've got two incidents going on at once, dispatching for the entire county grinds to a halt...

 

[SandpitMedic]

Half the time there is a fire truck sitting in front of the house, so that makes it easy.

Benefits of a dual response. Look for the big red scene indicator.

 

[mycrofft]

No, worse--Sheriff's Deputies! To be fair, the Sheriff's office has gotten a lot better since taking over dispatching about a year and a half ago, but they don't have any backup dispatchers. So any time one goes on vacation or is sick, their choices are to try and see if another dispatcher can cover or to pull a Deputy. Each Township has their own FD but we only have 3 EMS departments in the county. The other 2 are centered around 1 town and is generally where the deputies live/work. Ours is out in the middle of nowhere and we cover multiple counties and towns. They've been instructed to always give Fire/EMS runs a township (We have something like 6 main streets in our district) but when they give a location, they often don't go further than "the elementary school," or "town hall," or "village green."

Before budget cuts we actually had our own dispatcher and most of them were also members of the squad who did a shift or two a week part time as a dispatcher. They shared an office with PD. It was nice to have people that know how you operate and to know how your dispatcher operates. As a courtesy to the FD's we ran with, we also monitored firegrounds for them for something like a measly $1k a year.

But budget cuts caused them to consolidate dispatching centers so our dispatching center is now far, far away (I've actually never been to it, I just know it's about half an hour outside of us). Which unfortunately put dispatching into the hands of people who have no EMS training (it took us a year to get them to stop just calling injured person or ill person on everything, but they didn't understand BLS vs ALS and how a cardiac run would get ALS but an ill person gets BLS).

An unpleasant side effect is that they can't monitor our EMS Tac channel or our Firegrounds because they are too far away. So our choices are to use an unmonitored fireground (which we sometimes do for rescue incidents) or to use the main dispatch channel as our fireground (which is repeater-ed). Needless to say, if we've got two incidents going on at once, dispatching for the entire county grinds to a halt...

Get a little lonely out there sometimes?