News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
The Tennessee Advanced Communications Network is expected to go live for all ambulance services in the Upper Cumberland within the next several weeks.
Putnam County 911 Assistant Director Josh Womack said the system allows ambulances to talk directly with any hospital on the network. Womack said that extra communication will save crucial amounts of time in the life-or-death scenarios that emergency services work with.
“So being able to tell them from a greater distance that they’re bringing this patient in gives the hospitals more time to prepare, to get that intervention set up and get that started,” Womack said. “If they need to call people in, if they need to get a certain piece of equipment from another place in the hospital, that just allows them that time to be ready when that patient shows up.”
Womack said every EMS department in the Upper Cumberland installed the system into their ambulances as of August. The services are nearly done with testing. Womack said this is the first region in the state to fully incorporate the system into its emergency services.
“We’re kind of the guinea pigs to let the rest of the state know,” Womack said. “And we’ve talked at some of the meetings that I’ve been at, ‘Hey, what’s your tips, what’s your tricks, what did you do here, what did you do there?’ So being able to shed some light on it for the other counties and be like, ‘Hey, this is what we did, this is what worked for us, this is what did not work for us,’ I think it’s pretty huge to be able to just be the first one to try it out.”
Womack said the system has its own learning curve but those issues have been worked out for the most part.
“Just working with the hospital, making sure that they can hear the radio because it’s a little different than what they were used to,” Womack said. “So making sure that you’re using the right radio and making sure you’re hearing the units coming in is the biggest thing.”
Womack said the system has mainly been used by the Tennessee Highway Patrol and various state agencies before now.
“It’s going to have the ability for users: firefighters, police officers, highway patrol, EMS, to be able to talk from one end of the state to the other basically when it’s all built out,” Womack said.
Womack said Tennessee Advanced Communications Network Director Jeff Gray plans to eventually put a radio on that network in every ambulance, hospital, and regional medical communication center in the state.
