Set Up the Ambulance Fleet and Crews

Before anyone can be dispatched, there has to be something to dispatch. The fleet is the register of ambulances a facility runs; the crew is the people rostered onto them. A dispatcher — the person who runs the control desk — keeps both current, because a dispatch picks a vehicle from this register and a vehicle is only offerable when it is in service. This is standing setup work: you do it once and keep it tidy, not every call.

Who / when: Chidi the dispatcher maintains the fleet and crew rosters at the start of a shift, or whenever a vehicle goes into or out of service. Maintaining the fleet and the roster is the dispatcher’s control-desk job — a paramedic (the field clinician) cannot edit them, and the dispatcher in turn never writes the clinical run sheet. That split is deliberate.

We will follow Chidi, setting up the service for the day.

1. Dispatcher — open Ambulance & EMS → Fleet & Crew. This is the standing register: every ambulance and the crew rostered on it.
2. Dispatcher — add an ambulance. Give it a call-sign (the name you will say on the radio, e.g. “Alpha-1”), its plate, its type, and its base. The type says what the vehicle can do:
   • BLS — Basic Life Support.
   • ALS — Advanced Life Support.
   • MICU — Mobile Intensive Care Unit.
   • PTS — Patient Transport Service (routine, non-emergency transport).
3. Dispatcher — set the vehicle’s status. Available means it is in service and offerable for dispatch; Out Of Service parks it so it never appears in the dispatch picker. (The live statuses Dispatched, On-Scene, Transporting and At-Hospital are set automatically as a run progresses — you do not set those by hand.)
4. Dispatcher — roster the crew. Pick the crew member from the staff picker (Veona resolves the name from their staff record — you never type a free-text name), set their role (Paramedic, EMT or Driver), and set the shift start and end. The shift end must be after the start.
5. Dispatcher — when a shift ends, stand the crew member down. That closes the assignment without deleting the history.

Note

EMT stands for Emergency Medical Technician. A vehicle can carry several crew at once; the dispatch screen shows the active crew rostered on each vehicle so you know who is on board.

Tip

Keep at least one ambulance Available at all times. If every vehicle is busy or Out Of Service, the dispatch screen will tell you there are no in-service ambulances — there is nothing to send.

What happens next

With the fleet registered and the crew rostered, the dispatch desk has something to work with. When an emergency call comes in, Chidi opens it on the Dispatch board and assigns one of these in-service ambulances and its lead attending — and the run begins.

Follow the trail

• Next: Take a Call, Dispatch, and Complete the Run Sheet
• Related: Hand Off the Patient and Open an ED Visit · Front of House — Registration, Queue & Emergency