"Taxi Cab" EMS

If you call for help, emergency responders' goal is to get to you under nine minutes. Patients need a fast response especially for heat attacks, strokes and car accidents.

An On Your Side Investigation found not all 911 calls are serious, For example, one Greenville County man called for his wife, “My wife is hmm, hmm, constipated...she's hasn't used the bathroom in about a month.” She was not hurt, and she could walk, but they still requested an ambulance.

Another caller requests an ambulance for a woman, who need help going to the bathroom,
Caller: “She needs to go to the bathroom. She can't get up off of her chair.”
Dispatcher: “So, she just needs help getting up?”
Caller: “Right.”
Dispatcher: “She's not hurt or anything like that?”
Caller: “Oh, no.”

Calls for sore throats, the flu, and feet with a burning sensation are just a few more non-emergency calls the EMS department gets nearly every day.

Operator: Are you breathing normally”
Caller: “I'm alright. Except my feet burning.”
Operator: Are you breathing normally?”
Caller: “Yes.”

One woman call about a cut on her hand, that stopped bleeding yesterday.

Sgt. Brian Pothier responds to some of those non-emergency calls, “I've gotten calls for people who ask to go to this hospital, You bring them to the hospital and they walk out the front door because they live close.”


Dispatchers like, Jennifer Harmon, hear similar calls, “We've had calls where someone wants us to come and turn their heat up for them.”

Non-emergency calls are a big chunk of the department's calls. In 2006 and 2007, Greenville county EMS responded to nearly 84,000 calls. Of those calls, nearly 20 percent were non-emergencies.


These calls are more than just a nuisance. The calls could put your lives in danger when you have a real emergency.

Greenville County's EMS department is not alone. Spartanburg and Anderson County’s policy is the same. If you call, they must haul, making emergency response vehicles sometimes run more like glorified taxi cabs

Captain Mike Mitchel with the Greenville County EMS Department, “If anybody in our county calls us and wants a paramedic to evaluate we will send them an ambulance.”

Mitchel admits- non emergency calls do impact response times for real emergencies, but unless the county changes its policies, or people stop calling for non-emergencies, the county will likely continue to pick up those---who could have helped themselves.
It's hard to track how much non-emergency calls impact true emergencies, but we found at least two recent cases when patients in need waited twice the normal response time because of crews dealing with non emergencies.