[High precision of the emergency call]

In the emergency office, as the central contact place for somebody seeking medical aid the emergency call is distributed to the on-call practitioners or to the ambulance service. Prerequisite is a high precision of the emergency call.

In 63% of direct emergency caller information is classified as useful. 98.4% of the call receiving staff reacted calm, straight forward and experienced. In 74.9% the content was complete, not considering more detailed circumstances. 84.7% of the direct calling persons but only 50% of the indirect calling persons gave complete information. In 70.3% of emergency calls no medical diagnosis could be determined. More frequently, symptoms were mentioned indicating a specific disease (28.6%). Due to insufficient specificity the decision to send an emergency doctor was made if life threatening could not be excluded (34.9%). In 31.4% of cases the order of emergency doctors from the emergency office were not justified retrospectively according to the doctors impression at the place of emergency. The justified use of the emergency doctors was highest in patients with internal diseases (58.9%). The necessity of sending an emergency doctor according to direct and indirect reporting was 70.5% and 57.9%, respectively.

The analysis shows, that the person reporting the emergency is often not able to meet the requirements of medical aid and that he is not able to estimate the necessary level of medical aid. In addition, an improved qualification of the staff in the emergency office is needed to improve the correct distribution of emergency calls. Through further qualification of this staff a potential cost saving in the area of emergency service could be achieved.