A spokesman for the Prince George’s County Fire/EMS Department said county ambulance crews frequently spend up to an hour waiting to transfer patients into the care of hospitals in the central part of the county.
“It happens more often than not,” said department spokesman Mark Brady. “It can be anywhere from half an hour, from 45 minutes to an hour.”
That wait, Brady said, means emergency medical personnel and response equipment are tied up at hospitals instead of returning to their stations to await the next call.
A spokeswoman for Prince George’s Hospital Center said an hour is triple the time crews should spend at that facility.
“Our goal is to have them out 20 minutes or less,” Suzanne Almalel said, “but sometimes there is a glitch and we’re overcrowded.”
Almalel said the hospital treats the most serious trauma cases — those that arrive by medical helicopter — first, with patients who arrive by ambulance or walk-in seen next depending on the severity of their condition. Doctors and nurses pulled away to other emergencies or too few beds, and sometimes a combination of the two, can cause long waits not only at Dimension Healthcare Systems’ Cheverly location but also at the Laurel Regional Hospital and Bowie Health Campus.
“If it’s happening here, it’s happening somewhere else,” Almalel said.
A committee has been formed to study how to fix the problem, Almalel said. Additional beds might help the situation, she said, but EMS crews also have to transfer information about a patient’s condition to a hospital staff member.
“They just can’t drop the patient off — they have to go through all of the vitals,” Almalel said. “It’s just like a hand-off.”
For now, Brady said, an EMS field supervisor will either call or visit a hospital to learn the circumstances behind a backup. But status checks only tell ambulance crews what to expect, not how to fix the problem.
“Obviously we’d like to have some control over when we’re getting our units back and getting them on the streets,” Brady said.
