Ben-Nadav Hafri
speaker
333 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Ben-Nadav Hafri’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Beyer was a Boy Scout. Scrupulous. The reason he was speaking to me is because in his capacity as the EMS Medical Director of the Berrien County Medical Control Authority, he is responsible for the ambulances of Berrien County. And that means he's thought a lot about the noises that those ambulances make. And he's arrived at a very controversial position.
No evidence that lights and sirens helps anybody? This, even to me, an inveterate complainer about sirens, was a huge surprise.
A lot of EMS across the country has a similar kind of tiered intake system, a way to rank every incoming 911 call based not on its importance, but on its time sensitivity. In Berrien County, they would tag a call with priority one or two, depending on what the issue was.
Except the system wasn't really working.
So you only have a certain number of ambulances, but if a full half of your calls are coming in as urgent, how do you fix the problem? How do you get all those ambulances where they need to be? Well, an easy way is to get more places faster, which theoretically you can do very easily if you're exempt from all typical traffic laws, precisely why we have sirens.
But it's a little more complicated than that.
Specifically, it increases your chance of an accident by over 50%, which is crazy. This is according to a peer-reviewed 2019 study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. The risk is even higher when transporting a patient than when initially responding, but either way, the chance of an accident is a lot higher when you're using lights and sirens than if you're not.
Also, these are very often bad accidents. Ambulances are heavy, not a risk worth taking if you're just responding to a toothache.
So there's the accidents risk, but also, and this is really surprising, using lights and sirens doesn't actually save that much time on your route to the patient. For decades now, studies have shown that lights and sirens seem to save on average between 42 seconds and three minutes and 48 seconds.
It's about one and a half minutes of savings if you're in a city and a little over three and a half minutes if you're in the country on average.
And that's not a critical interval most of the time.
I mean, that's huge. Yeah, that is huge. But heart attacks are actually one of the few exceptions, not the rule. And yet they are the exception on which the rule is largely based. So all of these factors led Bayer to do something big. He restructured the tiers.
They ran through their data on all the calls that they had responded to priority one, lights and sirens, and they reassessed whether those really needed to be lights and sirens.
So with all this data, Beyer and his team changed how the calls were coded.
Let that sink in. Ambulance lights and sirens in Berrien County were sounding half as often as they had before. Now, even I was wondering, could you really know that this switch wasn't putting anyone at risk? Well, eventually, they followed up on the people the ambulances had picked up in the field to see how the hospital coded the patients as they came in.
So if you went to someone as a priority two, not that urgent, and they showed up to the hospital as a priority one, that would mean that you'd made a mistake. How much more often was that happening under the new coding system than the old? It was the same number. Wow. There was basically no difference. As in, he halved the number of lights and sirens responses in Berrien County.
He reduced the risk of accidents as a result. And it cost the people of Berrien County nothing.
Buyer's on board, the paramedics are on board, smooth sailing.
Unbeknownst to Beyer, word had gotten out to the people who call ambulances. Big problem.
The local news began doing man on the street interviews.
Showing 181–200 of 333 · page 10 of 17
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