Uber for ambulances: are we ready for it?
Edmund Stubbs, 9 July 2015
Yesterday, Professor Will Stewart’s team from the Institution of Engineering and Technology recommended a surprising update to the 999 emergency service.
In the age of the smartphone, with the majority of young and middle aged people using texts or their equivalents such as Snapchat or Facebook messenger, Professor Stewart argues that the young, increasingly being less familiar with voice calls, need an emergency contact system that is more user friendly. Consequently, the NHS needs to modify the way in which the public interacts with operators.
The NHS already has a text service available for those with hearing or speech difficulties. To use it patients must register by texting 999 and then following a set of texted instructions. When an emergency occurs the user texts details of the problem and their location to the service required to receive a ‘standard callout’.
Professor Stewart emphasises the fact that digitally savvy young people are statistically more likely to be involved in accidents or become victims of crime than are their elders, hence the need for an updated voiceless service, similar to the above, relevant to them in emergency situations. The implementation of GPS technology by the emergency services is possibly the most innovative aspect of the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s proposed scheme.
The ‘Uber’ app, which allows one to order a cab by smartphone determined by the GPS locations of your device and destination has become hugely successful. You can even observe a small cartoon taxi cab moving towards you on a digital map while you wait. The GPS ordering system is so accurate that taxis usually arrive within sight of the individual who has requested them, and this technology is likely to get more accurate in years to come. Could an app for emergency services work in a similar way in the future?
In responding to an emergency call there is obviously a need for more information than a pinpointed location alone can supply. A taxi driver generally knows what to expect when he arrives at his call; whether the client is lively and chatty at the end of party or grumpy and tired after being caught in the rain miles from home makes little difference to him or her.
However, the difficulty of employing a Uber-style app by the emergency services comes in relation to the extra information required to determine the level of urgency, the type of response team needed and any necessary preparations at the hospital. Any proposed emergency services app would need to prompt individuals to select categories in a stressful crisis situation. It would also have to make sure the app was not prone to be activated in someone’s pocket by accident.
These and other foreseeable difficulties in introducing any emergency app begs the question as to whether it is not easier and quicker simply to make a call. In the voice to voice situation highly trained call handlers have the opportunity to calm patients, ensure relevant information is obtained and offer immediate life support advice. However, what would be highly useful might be a means, while on the phone, of sending a GPS location to the call handler, especially if the caller were to find themselves in an unfamiliar location.
Professor Stewart’s team have an interesting idea for an ‘eCall’ which might be adapted for NHS emergency service use. Their example concerns an automatic vehicle accident alert where, in the future, ‘intelligent’ equipment could detect when a car has crashed, automatically alert the authorities and give the location, number of passengers, time speed of collision etc. The team have also suggested allowing smartphones to activate video and audio to assess the emergency situation by allowing the caller to show the call handler their immediate environment.
The NHS has been criticised by some as not being willing to embrace technology rapidly enough as in the case of the introduction of digital patient records. However, with regard to introducing experimental technology into emergency services its seems likely that, until systems become much more sure and sophisticated, having a trained professional at the end of a phone will remain the highly preferable option.
Edmund Stubbs, Healthcare Researcher, @edmundstubbs1