Denver Health Medical Center is revamping its policy for responding to structure fires after it took an ambulance 15 minutes — six minutes longer than protocol — to respond this week to a fire that put three members of a family in the hospital.
The hospital now will send an ambulance and a paramedic lieutenant to every structure fire in the city and county of Denver, replacing the former policy which required only a paramedic to respond until they were sure an ambulance was needed, said spokeswoman Julie Lonborg.
Shortly after 4 a.m. Tuesday, Denver Fire was called to the home where Pat Garcia, 47, and her two children, identified by 9News as 15-year-old Diana Mendez and 7-year-old Juan Alvarado, were trapped inside. Garcia’s husband, Julio Garcia, escaped.
The paramedic, who responds in a vehicle equipped with IV equipment, drugs and other emergency tools, met Denver Fire at the scene within seven minutes. Following the old protocol, an ambulance had been called by crews on the scene. It arrived in 15 minutes.
The mom and two children remained in serious condition Friday.
The National Fire Protection Association and the city of Denver have a standard response time for paramedics of nine minutes or less, Lonborg said.
“It was just plain busy” Tuesday morning, Lonborg said.
Denver Health runs on a unique split system in which ambulances are dispatched separately from paramedics. In combined systems, emergency fire vehicles and ambulances are stationed in the same building and are dispatched at the same time.
The protocol for crews from Denver Fire, which dispatches out of 34 stations across the city, is a four-minute response time on 90 percent of calls, said spokesman Phil Champagne.
“Denver Health has the best trauma survival rate in the country, and those people typically come to us via this system,” Lonborg said.
Ambulances are placed at strategic posts across the city, their location and number depend on call history, and posts can be anywhere from a parking lot to a street curb.
Additional resources will not be needed for the new protocol. Paramedics respond to an average of 800 structure fires a year. Last year, 25 patients were transported, two of them in critical condition.
“We really have to commend Denver Fire for the work they did at that fire,” Lonborg said.
Jordan Steffen: 303-954-1794 or jsteffen@denverpost.com
