The Expanded Implementation of the Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS) in Pinellas County: A Public Value Perspective
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Authors
Pennino, Joseph A.
Issue Date
2020-06
Type
Dissertation
Language
en_US
Keywords
Ambulance service--Dispatching , Dissertations, Academic--United States , Emergency medical services--Evaluation , Emergency medical services , Florida--Pinellas County , Telephone--Emergency reporting systems
Alternative Title
Abstract
The emergency medical services (EMS) system in Pinellas County, Florida has been regarded as one of the finest systems in the United States due to quick response times and the quality of care provided to the citizenry. It is designed of an amalgamation of 18 local fire departments, which deliver advanced life support (ALS) first response, and a private ambulance company, which provides emergency and non-emergency transport. As a whole, the system routinely surpasses its stated goal of arriving on the scene of an emergency medical incident within 7.5 minutes. However, Pinellas County has experienced an increase in population, tourism, homelessness, opioid-related 911 calls, and an aging baby boomer demographic. The EMS system has encountered a decrease in relative system capacity as the number of calls for service have steadily increased. Pinellas County’s dispatch center uses a form of emergency medical dispatch (EMD) called the Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS), which employs a series of questions to determine the nature of the medical emergency and to coordinate the most appropriate response. Nevertheless, up to this point, even many of the lowest priority incidents still receive both a fire department and an ambulance response. This retrospective quantitative analysis examined the more than 200,000 emergency incidents that occurred in Pinellas County in calendar year 2018. After investigating impacts on apparatus commitment factor, call concurrency, and response time using inferential statistics, it is determined that the expanded implementation of MPDS in Pinellas County would have increased the relative response capacity and performance of the EMS system. The theoretical framework used for this research was Moore’s public value theory, specifically, the application of the public value strategic triangle theoretical model.
Keywords: Medical Priority Dispatch System; MPDS; Pinellas County EMS; Emergency Medical Services; Criteria Based Dispatch; Public Value Theory;
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This dissertation is protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States (Public Law 94-553, revised in 1976). Consistent with fair use as defined in the Copyright Laws, brief quotations from this material are allowed with proper acknowledgement. Use of the materials for financial gain with the author's expressed written permissions is not allowed.