Calling 911?

After a long day at the clinic of internal medicine and the genetics lab, I couldn’t miss this article at Emergency Physicians Monthly:

Patients call the emergency department and ask the secretaries to call 911 for them.

The second time I know it wasn’t a joke because we told the lady to hang up and dial 911, then we heard the call go out on the radio a short time later.

When you call 911, the caller is identified by the telephone number. If the ED calls 911, the ambulance would technically get dispatched to the ED (don’t laugh, I’ve heard stories of upset patients in waiting rooms calling 911 for an ambulance transport to a different hospital).