By Larry King
The Philadelphia Inquirer
BUCKS COUNTY, Pa. — A Bucks County dispatcher has been suspended without pay for two days after sending an ambulance to a wrong address on an emergency medical call.
The mistake added about 10 minutes to the response time in the Aug. 10 call. But officials said there was no way to tell whether a quicker arrival could have saved Lenora “Lynn” Trusdell, 70, who died of an apparent heart attack at her Solebury Township home.
“The quicker you get to them, the better off they’re going to be,” said Scott Henley, assistant chief of the Central Bucks Ambulance and Rescue Unit. “But I can’t answer whether it would have been a better outcome.”
Trusdell had no pulse and was not breathing when a Central Bucks ambulance arrived 24 minutes after she collapsed in her kitchen, Henley said. Solebury police had arrived 12 minutes earlier, found her unresponsive, and had administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation and electric shocks unsuccessfully over the next 12 minutes.
“If you go into cardiac arrest and do not receive defibrillation within three or four minutes, then the chance of you being converted starts getting less and less,” said John Dougherty, the county’s emergency services director.
Calls for this article to Trusdell’s daughter and two witnesses were not returned.
It was the second time this year that Bucks County dispatchers have been disciplined for mishandling a call.
In January, a 53-year-old Doylestown woman died in a house fire after dispatchers took almost a minute to answer her call and then put her on hold. Six dispatchers were suspended, a seventh was reprimanded, and the county emergency communications director resigned.
Police reported that Trusdell had grown fatigued while working at the antiques shop she owned next to her home on Lower York Road. She and a friend returned to Trusdell’s house, where she collapsed at 3:29 p.m.
The friend called 911 on a cell phone, but did not know the exact address. Instead, she gave dispatchers the name of the antiques store.
Police arrived at the store only to discover that the crisis was at the neighboring house. By then it was 3:41 p.m., and a neighbor was administering CPR to Trusdell.
At that point, police called dispatchers to clarify the address. But in updating the information, the police dispatcher, who was not identified, mistakenly typed in Lower Mountain Road - listed in the computer as a nearby cross street - instead of Lower York Road.
By then it was 3:42 p.m., Henley said. The ambulance, still a minute or two from the house, turned around and headed for Lower Mountain Road. The mistake was later discovered, and the ambulance arrived at 3:53 p.m.
Dougherty blamed the matter on human error.
“I’m not making an excuse, and I know if it were one of my family members, I might not want to hear this,” he said. “But our dispatchers are not machines. They are human beings.”