Bill Compton, senior vice president for Grady Emergency Medical Services, is happy to deliver data on response times for his ambulances in one of the most vulnerable corners of the state: south Fulton. And why wouldn’t he be pleased?
Grady, he said, has shaved off 10 minutes from the previous ambulance service’s response times. “That’s my Reader’s Digest version,” he recently told an Atlanta committee of evaluators.Meanwhile, not everyone is buying it, especially a competitor.Compton’s data is “self-reported and not vetted,’’ Terence Ramotor, regional director for American Medical Response, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That’s why he cautions against using the data to compare AMR’s performance of a year ago to Grady’s.
Amid public uproars over long waits for emergency transport, debates over the accuracy of reported response times for ambulances are common across the state.