Today I think a truck driver (3rd party) died at the factory I work at.
He arrived early in the morning, and waited for a truck to leave the bay. He walked into the shop, told the shipping clerk he was ready to pull in once the other truck left. A little while later the other truck pulls out, and this trucker backs in. About 10-15 minutes after that two of the employees at our shop go outside and notice the trucker lying on the ground, bleeding, and in a puddle of blood. Some time in those 10-15 minutes he somehow fell and hit his head very badly. Blood was coming from an open wound on his head, and from his mouth, nose, and ears.
9-1-1 was dialed, and the first people there used clean rags to try and halt the bleeding. A handful of people are certified in CPR and one of them goes out to do basic stuff. First response was a police officer, followed by the fire department. Basic help is provided, but times starts passing and there is no sign of an ambulance arriving. The police officer and the fire department don't know where they are.
A few years back the local hospital farmed out its EMS services to a private company. This company happened to be located less than a mile from the factory, and the hospital about a couple miles the other direction. The ambulance service from this EMS company never showed up. They ended up getting one from the next county over, about 40 minutes. They got the guy to the hospital, and he was air lifted to a larger one in State, very serious injuries. The local hospital couldn't tell us anything beyond the air lifted status (assumed serious injuries because that's the only reason it's ever done). Contacting the company the trucker worked for, their response was "his condition does not look good".
The police and fire department seemed pretty in the dark as to what the private EMS service was doing, and one of the higher ups for (my) company sent a report to the local paper about the seeming lack of response from the EMS company, and about his feelings about the hospital putting these services onto another company, and about how the hospital is spending a large sum of money on a building expansion...
I'm curious about stuff like Liability when it comes to response times for EMS services? Given what I saw today I'm kind of hoping I never get seriously injured like that. The last time something happened was a stroke from an older employee, but it was when the hospital was providing the services, and it was about 10 minutes and the hospital's EMS was there.
Initial feelings seem to be that the reason for the lack of response was because the hospital switched to this other company, but is it fair to say that the hospital farming out its services had a large contribution to the lack of response?