KLAS-TV Channel 8 News Las VegasI-Team: Ambulance to Hospital Transfer Times Studied

I-Team: Ambulance to Hospital Transfer Times Studied

When you call 911 for an ambulance, you expect an immediate response. But local ambulance companies say they are often stuck waiting to drop off patients in local emergency rooms and that keeps the ambulances off the streets. The Channel 8 I-Team has obtained the results of a study which shows the extent of the problem.

What's at issue here is called "transfer times." How long does it take to get a patient transferred from an ambulance to a hospital emergency room?

Two years ago -- the state legislature required that it take no longer than 30 minutes. The legislature also ordered a study to try to get a handle on the problem and find out -- where are the bottlenecks? Such a study has never been done before. It was headed by the Southern Nevada Health District which readily admits this was a very complicated process and relies on incomplete data. So how did our community do?

The study says the average transfer time for all 13 Clark County hospitals was 35-minutes-and-58 seconds. 

In the metropolitan area -- Spring Valley Hospital leads the rankings with an average transfer time of 10-minutes-and-49 seconds with a 97-percent compliance rate. In descending order: Valley Hospital, Saint Rose, Summerlin, North Vista, Southern Hills, Desert Springs, Sunrise, UMC, St. Rose-Siena Campus and Mountain View. 

Some of our biggest local hospitals are near the bottom of the list. At a hearing on Wednesday -- the Health District, the state hospital association, and even the Henderson Fire Department cautioned this early data is flawed.

With only one computer terminal at many larger hospitals -- nurses were busy caring for patients rather than entering data. So now the question is... what's next? 

Lawmakers who received this report Wednesday say the data is likely so flawed they can't draw any conclusions and they were not happy about it.  They want the hospitals and the Health District to go back to the drawing board to try to fine-tune the process.    

The computer software used to run the study cost $22,000 and was split between hospitals and 9 different EMS agencies.