Statistics: 1, Patients: 0

The Royal Brisbane Hospital has a write-up room for ambulance crews. At any given time there is at least one, usually two or three, ambulance crews in there writing up the case they have just dropped off.

So when a job came up to attend a patient who was 500m from the hospital it struck me as a bit odd that the dispatcher sent our crew, who were at the station ten kilometres away and had to crawl through peak hour traffic, rather than waiting for a crew at the hospital to finish their write-up and send them. A crew coming from the hospital (even with a ten minute delay to finish write-up) would have reached him much earlier than we did.

The answer is, as usual, the triumph of patient care statistics over actual patient care. The communication centre's performance is measured on how quickly they dispatch an ambulance, not how quickly it gets there (another department's problem).