In Rio Arriba County, garbage trucks are equipped with global positioning satellites (GPS) but ambulances are not.
That renders the Rio Arriba County/Española 911 Center’s enhanced 911 system nearly useless to paramedics trying to locate patients, according to Española Hospital paramedic Siri Khalsa.
“(Enhanced 911) is meaningless to us without GPS,” Khalsa said. “The only way we know where anything is, is dispatch tells us. Dispatch gives us an address and more often than not we have to ask what area it’s in.”
Enhanced 911 automatically shows Center dispatchers the location of someone calling from a landline, but not from a cell phone, Center Director Marti Griego said. Each phone customer in the County is charged .51 per month for the service, which itself took the Center about 15 years to implement.
But even with enhanced 911, dispatchers must still frequently give driving instructions to responding paramedics because of the absence of ambulance-mounted GPS units, Khalsa said.
“We have been sent to the wrong area before looking for a county road that’s not there,” Khalsa said. “Dispatch has inadvertently sent us to the wrong place, like to Ojo Caliente when we should be in Abiquiú. By the time the mistake’s figured out, we’ve been delayed 20 or 30 minutes. And at night, we have to crawl along at low speed to spot private drives off county roads.”
That wouldn’t happen if the ambulances had GPS, Khalsa said.
“There are other advantages (to GPS) too,” Khalsa said. “People who call from town don’t always know where they are. And some people don’t know their address or how to tell us to get to their own house. They’ll tell us to turn by an old tree that got hit by lightening, that sort of thing.”
For a decade, Albuquerque Ambulance company ambulances have been equipped with computers that automatically display that information and plots the quickest route to the emergency, Khalsa said. Like Española Hospital and its ambulance service, Albuquerque Ambulance is owned by Presbyterian Healthcare Services.
County Assistant Manager Tomas Campos and County Emergency Response Manager Mateo DeVargas expressed surprise upon learning that the Hospital’s ambulances lack GPS units.
“I didn’t know they don’t have GPS,” Campos said. “We fund (Española Hospital) via the mill Levy but we’ve never interfered with how they run the ambulances.”
But the Hospital is not alone. Campos was quick to add that ambulances at La Clinica del Pueblo in Tierra Amarilla also lack GPS units. Campos is a La Clinica director.
“The four emergency rescue units (owned by the County) don’t have GPS either,” Campos said. “We can’t afford them right now.”
Equipping each ambulance with GPS units and accompanying laptop computers and software would cost well less than $5,000, Khalsa estimated. Some models are available for less than $600.
However, they wouldn’t solve every problem paramedics may encounter locating an emergency, Hospital Emergency Operations Director Bill Mauldin said.
Some rural houses that don’t have street addresses may not show up on GPS mapping systems, Mauldin said.
“That’s true but Albuquerque Ambulance checked for us a couple of years ago whether GPS software would work up here, and it did,” Khalsa said. “During the Cerro Grande fire (in 2000), Albuquerque Ambulance sent up a GPS-equipped ambulance as backup in Española, and their GPS worked fine. That was 10 years ago.”