Phone call duration with City Department of Urgent medical care in the chest pain case, before medical assistance is sent

Introduction: Chest pain or discomfort is a potentially life threatening medical state. Every delay from symptoms onset to delivering medical assistance is of utmost importance. Avoiding prehospital delay is crucial. Aim: Establish phone call duration with an emergency operator in the cases of chest pain. Method: Electronic switchboard database from the City Department of Urgent medical care was used. We analysed accepted calls from April 1st to December 1st, 2009. Measured time starts with emergency operator call acceptance and ends with forwarding the call to the dispacher. Results: We analysed 2469 phone calls, with minimal duration of 82 seconds, maximal duration of 385 seconds and mean duration of 182 seconds; 50% of phone calls were finished after 167 seconds and 90% of all calls after 288 seconds. Discussion: Recommended time in different Emergency care facilities varies from 60s to 90s to 120s. One of the standards recommends that 99% of phone calls should be finished within 90s, which is much shorter then our research showed. Conclusion: Our research showed rather long mean and maximal phone call durations. Time frame must be defined as a rule, and although it may not always be able to act within, it is something which should be defined and aspired to.