By Mike King
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
FULTON COUNTY, Ga. — It would be easy to blame the death of Darlene Dukes on the 911 operator who botched the call. A review of her personnel record shows the operator had been reprimanded and suspended numerous times while employed there over 17 years. She should not have been on the job.
But before anybody decides to close the book on this case, the entire system needs an independent review by an outside agency or investigator with no ties to the county. County manager Zachary Williams has promised such a review. He must carry it out.
Over the years, Fulton’s 911 program has come under criticism by police and first responders, as well as EMS providers and emergency department physicians at Grady Memorial Hospital. There are plenty of people at fault besides the fired 911 operator.
There is, for example, county Emergency Management Agency director Alfred “Rocky” Moore, who also served as director of the 911 center.
Moore, a former police officer who has no background in handling medical emergencies, was removed from the 911 post on Tuesday, but stays on as EMA director. Yet it was Moore who, late last year, fooled the county into believing it could stop subsidizing emergency ambulance runs without jeopardizing patient safety.
The Dukes case and the decision to cut off ambulance subsidies ought to concern Fulton residents; they should wonder how seriously the county takes its responsibility to provide emergency services.
Last summer, Rural/Metro Ambulance service, one of the county’s contractors, provided a report listing 19 specific errors in the first six months of 2007, including lost calls, a 50-minute delay in dispatching a call off busy Ga. 400 and an operator who ignored repeated calls.
Besides problems with staffing — including the county’s civil service system that protects obviously incompentent employees — there is another serious flaw in the Fulton system. Incredibly, the system still relies on 911 operators to dial a 10-digit telephone number to a geographic-specific ambulance service before help gets on the way. Fulton’s 911 service has deteriorated so badly that Grady Health System’s ambulance service, which serves the city of Atlanta, set up its own call center inside the hospital so that it didn’t have to wait to be dispatched by the county.
In recent weeks Alpharetta, Milton and Johns Creek all have made arrangements with Rural/Metro dispatchers to intercept 911 calls directly in Alpharetta. It is exactly this kind of fragmentation the state was looking to eliminate when it created a system of regional EMS services coordinated at the county government level.
The county made a mistake when it cut off subsidies to ambulance providers. It will have compounded that error if it doesn’t fix the 911 system.