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No more drunk driving? US to force carmakers to adopt life-saving tech by 2024
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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If you need to go to the hospital for an emergency call an ambulance and don't use it as an excuse for driving while drunk.
This is the USA. If you call the ambulance you need to take out a new mortgage on your house.
Imagine a family member showing signs of a stroke and you're twenty minutes outside of town. Are you really going to call for an ambulance and double the wait time before they're in the ER? Check your privilege city boy.
Just so I understand, in the context that you are replying to the theme of the article
the family member is showing signs of a stroke. The ambulance is going to take some time. You’ve been drinking and are over the limit, but thats still the best choice? Drunkenly driving to the hospital?
The context of the quoted section of the article is about what an acceptable false positive rate would be, not about what situations drunk driving would be acceptable.
And as shown, no one shall believe there was a false positive. WCGW?
Hey genius, this is about false positives.
In Germany there is a maximum first response time (depending on the Bundesland) of 8 to 17 minutes. This is by law and it is regularly verified that those times are not exceeded. The timer starts the moment you call and ends when the medical staff arrives.
So yes, calling an ambulance that will be there in unter 20 minutes is the preferred way. They will also send an emergency doctor who can directly start working while driving back to the hospital.
This article is about the US, Dirk.
To get that response rate in the United States, literally every single US citizen we have to work as a ambulance driver, and they still wouldn’t be enough
That sounds great for Germany, but what does that have to do with the US where this law is being mandated? The US isn't like Germany in any way that matters to this discussion.
Cool.
What's the first response time in the US?
Also, the ambulance has to go from the hospital to your house and back to the hospital, which is slower than a 1 way trip even with their sirens.
Not sure where you're located, but in the US most ambulances aren't based out of hospitals, usually there's ambulance stations, or they're attached to a fire company.
Now it's a big country with a lot of different types of towns with their own unique situations, but there's a lot of cases where your local ambulance company is going to be a lot closer to you than a hospital, which means they can make up the difference pretty easily with their sirens , and you start getting at least some level of treatment from EMTs or paramedics that much sooner.
And it has a doctor on board. So the emergency treatment starts right at my house.
In the US, ambulances are staffed by medical technicians and have no connection to hospitals or doctors outside of delivering patients to them.
Ehh, restricted to the capacities of an ambulance which is why they're taking you to a hospital anyways.
Also, the 1-way trip the ambulance makes to your house could be done in a similar amount of time as the 1-way trip you take to the hospital. Then your real treatment can begin.
Modern ambulances are rolling ICUs, though.
Sure they are.
Ambulances almost never have a doctor onboard in the US
There are 2 main levels of EMS, Basic Life Support (BLS) and Advanced Life Support (ALS) There's some additional sub-categories, and some things vary according to local regulations and such, bit I'm just giving a very general overview.
As a general rule BLS will be staffed by EMTs and ALS will have a paramedic.
Paramedics can start an IV, administer some more medications than an EMT can, and provide some other more advanced treatments, but they stop well short of what a doctor can do.
Not all ambulances are staffed to the ALS level, a lot of places have had a hard time keeping their EMS agencies fully staffed, I know in my area, in theory, all of our agencies can provide ALS service, but frequently some of them have to go BLS-only due to staffing issues. Because of this, some areas have started expanding the scope of what EMTs are able to do to make up for a lack of paramedics (though they also often face a lack of EMTs as well)
I'm sure that's the same over here. But the situation in this discussion was that a family member shows signs of a stroke, in this case I don't think they will send an ambulance only capable to provide BLS but hopefully one of those.
MSUs are really cool, and I hope we see more of them, but they're relatively new, the first in the US hasn't even been around for a decade, so they aren't everywhere yet, as best as I can find, there's only a couple dozen or so of them throughout the country right now. I actually work in a 911 dispatch center, we don't have one in the area I work for (which is a pretty well-funded and equipped area) and they're not even something I remember being covered in any of my trainings or certification classes (the certifications I have are from national organizations like APCO, so they cover a lot of stuff that often doesn't apply to my area)
Ideally it should get an ALS unit, but sometimes you do just have to work with what's available.
Also to be clear, I'm not saying not to call for an ambulance if someone's having a stroke and drive them yourself or anything like that. Unless you happen to live really close to the hospital you're still probably going to be better off even if you get stuck with a BLS ambulance, they have a better idea what they're looking at than the average layperson and they're probably going to get there safer than someone who's freaking out because their passenger is having a stroke, doesn't do anyone any good if you get into an accident on the way to the hospital, or if things take a turn for the worse and you end up having to pull over on the side of a highway and try to do CPR or something with traffic whizzing by you and have to wait for an ambulance anyway, not to mention the nightmare of trying to figure out where you are to send an ambulance (cell phone locations arent always super accurate)
The idea is that you are not actually drunk but in some upset condition because of an emergency. And that condition might trigger the anti-drunk mechanism. A breathalyzer might work, but the drunk drive can always get someone else to breath into it. Also not sure how much calibration such device needs, can it last for a few months in a cold/hot car and still work correctly?
Once you want something to validate the breathalyzer (to avoid asking your child to start your car for you while you are drunk) it get complicated and more error prone.
Yeah no problem, I'll just pony up $4000 because I drank a single beer at the wrong time . Why are people like you like this? You literally cannot imagine a scenario you haven't experienced and you express that lack of imagination by accusing anyone with imagination of being up to no good.
Seriously STFU
Damn! You have ambulance money?!? Nice
in that quote from the article, the hypothetical (and eventually, very real) victim of a false positive from less than absolute 100% accuracy is not a drunk.
and 'ambulance-worthy' emergencies are not the only critical and potentially life-saving trips that could be affected by a false-positive. how about the doctor who would treat that person in the ER, or a volunteer firefighter responding to a call, or a parent going to fetch their teen after they call for a ride from an unsafe situation........
Did you not see the second word in the quoted sentence?
The fuck? Do you have any idea how expensive ambulances are?
Last time I needed one my health insurance contacted me. I had to pay 10 Euros.
Bruv, US healthcare is a different ballgame.
I heard about it. Is it really that bad? Preferring to drive to the hospital on your own in case of an emergency instead of calling an ambulance sounds really wild.
Could you drop 4000+ on a mile car ride?
I have only used an ambulance once but it was for a friend and I who got into a car wreck. It set us back close to 10k thankfully it was covered by insurance.
That's insane!
And now you get it.
Here in the US, many of us have standing orders to NEVER call an ambulance, and be driven by a friend instead. If it’s really bad, we’ll be paying $10,000+ in medical bills already (assuming we have insurance, if not it’ll probably be closer to $1 mil). We just can’t afford to tack on an extra few thousand. And if it wasn’t bad after all, we definitely don’t want to pay an extra few thousand.
And heaven forbid you have to use Life Flight.
Plus, our ambulances are staffed by people paid just slightly above minimum wage, with no medical degree and only cursory medical training. To be fair, it’s better than most medical training (ie what police and firefighters get) but it’s still no doctorate.
That’s horrible! There should be proper health care all over the world!
Yes. Yes there should.
But keep us in mind as a cautionary tale should people in your country start talking about how ‘great’ private health care is.
It’s happening in England right now, in fact, so I bet there are at least some people in your country that will start trying to push it soon.
100%.
It is.
I camp and hike and such in some very rural, mountainous areas pretty regularly, cell service is often very spotty in those places. I know one place off the top of my head that I've been to a few times that I'd have to drive a few minutes away to get a signal.
Off the top of my head, one way around this might be to pair the alcohol sensor with a cellular connection that can call 911, if the car has a signal then the alcohol sensor is required, if it doesn't then the sensor is deactivated. You could also probably have better cellular equipment built into a car than a phone since you don't have to make compromises to keep everything pocket-sized, so you could potentially have more of a signal in more places by calling from your car than you would with your phone.
Yep, there always will be edge cases.