Deny Patients a Ride In the Ambulance - What Laws?

[Scottb]

There doesn't have to be a statute. The fact is that any ambulance service, private or not, that refuses transportation in an emergency is almost guaranteed to be hit with civil litigation from the patient or their family, with the additional possibility of criminal charges from negligence if the person dies from the direct result of a denied emergency transport. Any competent ambulance service understands this well. 

[Just Plain Ruff]

Problem is, we've been told over and over that we are not doctors and the only way to determine if someone is truly having a medical emergency is to transport them to the ER for evaluation.  Every medic I know is not willing to risk their licensure in order to buck the system and tell a patient that they don't qualify for a ambulance and they need to find another way to the hospital.  They not in a million years want to be the test case for a patient who truly didn't need an ambulance yet that patient felt they needed one for that stubbed toe or small laceration or what not and the patient sue that ambulance service and the medic with the Case resting on "what training did that medic have to rule out that I wasn't truly having a medical emergency that didn't require an ambulance transport???"  

 

Because we all know that many ambulance services will drop that medic and not support him/her for turfing that patient off to a UBER or a taxi cab even if there was a policy or guideline or protocol that in all actuality supported the medic refusing transport but the ambulance service see's a loss of the legal case in both the court of law and the court of public appeal.  The medic is the one who is going to lose out in the end.  

 

I'm not willing to risk my license just to turf a patient just to save my company a dollar or two policy/guideline/protocol or no and I don't think many of my colleagues will be willing to either.