Metropolitan Fire Brigade emergency responder program - a review of the first seven years: data

The Melbourne Metropolitan Fire and Emergency Services Board (MFB) was the first fire service in Australia to implement a service-wide emergency medical response (EMR) program in 2001. The EMR or "first responder" program provides training for fire fighters in treating cardiac arrest during a medical emergency. The closest fire fighters are dispatched at the same time as the closest ambulance. The objective of this study was to collect data on the first seven years of responses by fire-fighters as first responders within the MFB zones. Four MFB zones cover most but not all of the Melbourne suburban area. Central, covering city and inner suburbs, Western as far as Hoppers Crossing, Northern up to Epping and Southern which reaches down to Mentone. Commander Colin Bibbey and Station Officer Allan Morton from the MFB provided the three separate datasets consisting of callout record, patient care record and cardiac arrest record which included data from the automatic external defibrillator as electrocardiogram (ECG) files. Malcolm Boyle, Brett Williams and Christopher Huggins (Monash University, Department of Community Emergency Health and Paramedic Practice) combined and analysed the three data sets using SPSS which revealed that two minutes have been cut from the response time to cardiac arrest cases in the metropolitan fire district under the program.