DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — Every day, DeKalb County dispatchers are busy with call after call, so county leaders say a new program is helping them determine which are the highest priority.
“As for 2024, we had more than 700,000 911 calls alone,” Dekalb County E911 Director Carina Swain said.
With so many calls, it strains an emergency response system to get to every call with an ambulance or other emergency personnel.
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“It’s extremely important for us to have an alternative. At the end of the day, there is not going to be enough resources to make it to every call,” Dekalb County Fire Chief Darnell Fullum said “What we know is almost 50% of the calls that come into the 911 center don’t necessarily need an ambulance.”
Channel 2′s Michael Doudna learned that’s why the county worked with a provider to come up with the nurse navigator program in 2020.
“We asked for an innovative way to reduce the call volume that was responded to,” Chief Fullum said.
Nurse navigators allow dispatchers to send calls that are not high-priority calls to a system of nurses ready to answer.
“This allows us to connect the right resource at the right time,” said Gerad Troutman, Medical Director of Global Medical Response, which is the parent company of DeKalb County’s ambulance service.
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Troutman says the nurses will help the patient while assessing the best care for them.
“It is to tease out how quick we need care, in an hour, four hours, or 24 hours,” Troutman said.
Troutman says nurses can also arrange transportation, leveraging rideshare resources to get people to the care they need. Also, if a caller still wants an ambulance, one will be sent. However, Global Medical Response says in 97% of nurse navigation cases, ambulances are not needed.
“It allows us to preserve those higher levels of resources so we can get to those life-threatening emergencies in a more reasonable amount of time,” Troutman said.
The program has since spread to 14 states and handled more than 200,000 callers. The company boasts that 95 percent of the time, nurse navigators resolve the issue without the original caller needing to call 911 again.
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