Chennai: Callers to the 108 emergency ambulance service will no longer have to explain where they are. Officials say the change could cut response time – the time an ambulance takes to reach a patient in crisis – by up to three minutes.In weeks of testing, the system automatically captured a caller’s location the moment the call reached the control room, to within about 50m. If the caller confirms the address, the ambulance is sent directly to that spot. If the location is inaccurate, control room staff send a WhatsApp message asking the caller to share an exact location. Tests showed this narrows the margin to about 10m.An ambulance now takes about 10.4 minutes to reach the site after a call. “Getting the exact location takes 60 to 90 seconds. This can be cut by at least half,” said GVK-EMRI state head M Selvakumar. “It matters most at times when the address is hard to describe, such as highway stretches with few landmarks and homes in narrow lanes. Ambulance pilots slow down to ask for directions and other information, which can slow down response time,” he said.Ambulances are placed in hotspots, high-accident grids or areas with a high number of emergency calls, but return trips from some of these places can take longer. “We may not be able to intubate the patient at the nearest hospital, as the emergency rooms may not be equipped. We are doing what we can to reach the patient early and reduce overall transport time,” he said.Faster ambulances matter most in cardiac arrest and severe injury, studies show. A German resuscitation registry analysis of 10,853 cardiac arrest patients, published in Deutsches Arzteblatt International in 2018, found the chance of survival fell 5% for every extra minute the ambulance took to arrive. A PLOS Medicine study of 24,365 trauma patients in Japan, Korea, Malaysia and Taiwan found no link between longer pre-hospital time and death within 30 days, but each 10-minute delay in total pre-hospital time raised the odds of a poor functional outcome at discharge by 6%.The testing for the programme has been completed, officials said. EMRI says the system will go live within a week.
