By Clark Judge
(March 22, 2026) — When the Killingworth Ambulance Association broke down its 2025 responses, two familiar subjects headed the list — accidental falls and sickness. Both have been the two leading causes of calls since the KAA began tabulating them, and they were again last year.
But with one notable difference.
Where falls historically run first and sickness second, the two switched places in 2025. There were 130 ambulance calls for sick individuals … or 23.4 percent of the total … and 115 for patients who had fallen As you might expect, the number of calls for one — sickness — increased over the previous year, while those for falls declined.
The reason? EMTs aren’t quite sure.
“If you notice,” said KAA president Dan O’Sullivan, one of the KAA’s leading responders, “invalid assists are high, while falls are lower. We may have classified some of those one way last year, and a different way this time. But there’s another way to look at it: People who needed help called last year before they actually fell and risked hurting themselves.”
Chief of Service Mike Haaga agreed, though he amplified O’Sullivan’s first point, saying that a change in dispatch software may have caused some calls to be “classified differently” than past years. Nevertheless, while it changed the order at the top, it did not change the front runners … and see for yourself.
What follows are the top five causes for responses in 2025, with the totals listed first, followed by the percentage of all calls:
- SICKNESS … 130 (23.4).
- FALLS …115 (20.7 percent).
- BREATHING PROBLEMS … 51 (9.2 percent).
- ASSIST INVALID … 35 (6.3 percent)
- TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS … 29 (5.2 percent).
Now compare those totals to the breakdown of responses for 2024:
- FALLS… 129 (24.4 percent).
- SICKNESS… 108 (20.4 percent).
- TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS… 36 (6.8 percent).
- BREATHING PROBLEMS … 33 (6.2 percent).
- (tie) UNCONSCIOUS/FAINTING … 21 (4.0 percent).
CHEST PROBLEMS (non-traumatic) … 21 (4.0 percent).
It’s important to note that the number of responses dropped the past two years from the KAA’s record high of 574 in 2023. One year later it dropped to 532, while it declined again in 2025 to 522. But for this study, the KAA did not consider 522 ambulance runs; it considered 492, with the remaining 30 omitted because they involved non-transports.
A quick observation of the KAA’s findings reveals that, as was the case a year ago, not only did the number of calls for sick patients increase (from 99 in 2023 to 108 the following year) but so did the percentage of all responses. Where sickness comprised 17.6 percent of all responses in 2023, it moved to 23.4 two years later. As you might expect, the percentage of responses for accidental falls tracked in the other direction — dropping 3.7 points from a record 24.4 one year earlier.
That’s significant because it doesn’t correspond to a national trend. According to a study published earlier this year in USAFacts, where death rates for cancer and automobile accidents declined in the U.S. from 2000-2023, they tripled for accidental falls — so much so, in fact, that annual deaths from falls now outnumber those from traffic mishaps. As reported in the study, some of that can be explained by an aging population. In 2000, 12.4 percent of the U.S. population was older than 65. By 2023, that number had grown to 17.4 percent.
Photo by Clark Judge
