The city of Charleston is limiting fire truck responses on non-life threatening medical calls, following in the footsteps of other local municipalities who’ve done so for several years.
Fire personnel in Charleston will now only respond to the non-life threatening 911 calls — like nausea and earaches — when Emergency Medical Service workers either request assistance or the anticipated EMS response time is longer than 10 minutes.
Fire officials say the effort will free up fire personnel for more critical calls.
“I don’t want to be on a medical call that no one could reasonably expect is life-threatening and have a cardiac arrest come out a couple of blocks away and not have a fire unit close to that call,” said Charleston Fire Chief Dan Curia.
Like in some other municipalities, Charleston’s previous policy was that fire trucks were dispatched for all medical calls — even though their roles were limited at the scene. Firefighters could stabilize patients until EMS arrived, but couldn’t transport patients themselves.