Perhaps More Scary Then This Fatal Crash, Is the Lack of Oversight, Concern and Assistance

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Dear Senator…

On July 20, 2007 an ambulance from Antwerp (Ohio) Emergency Medical Services was heading south on county road 87 when it was broadsided by a commercial truck traveling east on state route 176. The result was one of the most horrific ambulance crashes in US history. Three emergency medical personnel and two patients were killed and two others were transported to nearby hospitals.

Perhaps more scary then this fatal crash, is the lack of oversight, concern and assistance the federal government provides to reduce the number and severity of such crashes. Ambulance crashes are 5 to 20 times more lethal per mile traveled than trucks, and have in excess of 4 times the annual fatality rate per mile of buses. I am also concerned because everyday I send out EMTs, paramedics and nurses to deliver quality care in these potential deadly vehicles.

Ambulances are essentially exempt from the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) and not covered by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). Yet, it appears that ambulance transport is THE MOST LETHAL form of transport per mile traveled on our roads and highways and likely the only form of transport on our highways that has no infrastructure to oversee and address its safety issues.

I ask your help in encouraging an NTSB investigation of this specific carnage and future ambulance crashes that result in significant damage, injury or death. There is no other safety oversight or even appropriately skilled personnel trained to investigate these events in a comprehensive and multidisciplinary manner. These events involve highway safety, transportation safety, commercial vehicle operation, vehicle design and safety, occupational health and safety, transportation systems engineering, highway design and emergency health care delivery, practice and policies. Only the NTSB has the mission and expertise to make this impartial and critical critique and to make the needed recommendations that can save lives of the ambulance personnel and those that entrust them with their lives. Despite their clear mission, the NTSB has not looked at an ambulance crash in nearly 30 years.

Unfortunately, unlike other modes of transport, there is also no central data base for such accidents. Please also encourage the NTSB to strongly recommend that existing federal data bases be expanded to include all major ambulance crashes. All NTSB reports become easy to access public record and easily accessible via the internet. Their impact is national (not local or regional)and can benefit all of EMS. The problem of predictable and preventable fatal ambulances crashes may actually be even bigger then we think!

I hope you and your staff shares my concern of putting associates, patients and loved ones in a box made by a cabinet maker and mounted on the back of a rapidly moving vehicle. I strongly encourage you to get the NTSB involved in ambulance crash investigation, data collection and evidence based recommendations that will improve the safety for all medical transport.

Please feel free to contact me if I can be of assistance.

Sincerely,

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