Emergency center dispatcher praised

An emergency center dispatcher in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, has been praised for her professional handling of a sick woman who was transported to hospital in time recently.

Wu Xixi received a call at the center but could only hear weak gasping on Monday.

The patient kept murmuring "headache", but couldn't say her exact location.

Wu immediately narrowed down her location with the help of the caller positioning system installed at the emergency center and contacted the police.

By working with the police, workers from the emergency center managed to find the patient in 20 minutes and sent her to a nearby hospital.

"We later found out that the patient lived alone and had no one by her side when she had the pain," said Wu.

"She was diagnosed with acute abdominal pain that can develop over a short period of time."

Guo Lisheng, office director of Nanjing Emergency Center, said that all the dispatchers at the center receive strict training with high standards.

"They must know how to process various kinds of emergencies during calls," he said.

"It's not one-time training. They're required to attend training continuously after work because every call may turn out to be critical to saving someone's life."

He added that the center has been using the caller positioning system since 2019, and he believed that the positioning accuracy of the callers will be further improved with the development of telecommunications technologies, which could greatly help them save more lives.

Wu reminded the public that when calling the 120 emergency center, the callers should give their locations as precisely as possible or describe nearby landmarks. If not possible, the callers might ask people nearby to take the phone and describe the callers' conditions briefly to prep the medical workers.

They also should not hang up the phone but instead wait for workers to make contact, she said.

Guo Jun contributed to this story.