This Week’s Report provides Mid Year Stats:

The Fire Department responded to 2005 calls for service during the first six months:

Fire Calls 214

Emergency Medical Calls 1688

Service Calls 102

A Reminder Flu Season is here!

The Flu season has arrived. Our first indicator was when “Wall Time” increased during emergency patient transport. Wall time is defined as the time it takes the hospital emergency room to accept patients when paramedics bring them to the emergency room receiving area. Paramedics with patients on the gurney wait along the hallways for hospital bed availability.

On average this takes 15-20 minutes. However, during the flu season times will often dramatically increase from 45 minutes to two hours. This is a significant problem as our paramedic resources are out of service during this time. It occurs based on the overcrowding in the emergency room combined with full hospital occupancy.

The overcrowding in the emergency rooms occurs as the influx of non-life threatening patients with the flu come to the emergency room for treatment instead of using an urgent care or primary doctor.

Please see the attached link for more information from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). http://www.cdc.gov/features/fluhighrisk/

Editor’s Note:  While the Flu information is important to read and the wait times in the hospitals (Wall Time) are interesting to understand that people with non-life threating illness should seek medical assistance from their urgent care or primary doctors.

The major issue is that Monterey Park’s ageing population requires emergency medical services so the taxpaying voters should request that the city invest in another paramedic ambulance or paramedic fire truck to cover the increase in population in the new housing developments, hotels and shopping centers.

Please address this issue with your Councilmembers, City Manager and Fire Department.