By Clark Judge
(February 19, 2025) — Stop if you’ve heard this before. Falls and sickness led all emergency responses in 2024 for the Killingworth Ambulance Association.
If that sounds familiar, it should. They’ve topped the field every year since the KAA started tracking calls, with falls the runaway leader. However, if you look more closely, you might notice something slightly unexpected about last year … because the KAA did. Where all calls dropped from 562 in 2023 to 532 one year later, the number of responses for falls and sickness did not.
Instead, they went up.
Not only were the 129 responses for falls the most ever, but so was the percentage of all calls (24.2). That means that nearly one of every four ambulance runs was devoted to victims who fell. A similar story applied to sick patients, with a record 108 ambulance runs devoted to them – or one of every five.
But while the top of the board was predictable, what followed was not. Traffic accidents, for instance, jumped from fifth in 2023 to third. Yet they fell in number from 41 to 36. Furthermore, while breathing problems dropped from third in 2023 to fourth one year later, their numbers fell appreciably from 54 to 36.
But let’s stop there and just go to the board. What follows are the top five responses for 2024, with the percentage of total calls in parentheses:
1. FALLS … 129 (24.2 percent).
2. SICKNESS … 108 (20.3 percent).
3. TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS … 36 (6.8 percent).
4. BREATHING PROBLEMS … 33 (6.2 percent).
5. (tie) UNCONSCIOUS/FAINTING … 21 (3.9 percent).
CHEST PROBLEMS (non-traumatic) … 21 (3.9 percent)
Now compare that list to the 2023 ledger. The order of the first two remains the same, but the numbers do not:
1. FALLS … 122 (21.6 percent).
2. SICKNESS … 99 (17.6 percent).
3. BREATHING PROBLEMS … 54 (9.6 percent).
4. PSYCHIATRIC PROBLEMS/ABNORMAL BEHAVIOR … 44 (7.8 percent).
5. TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS … 41 (7.3 percent).
Records released earlier this year revealed another unexpected finding – namely, that calls dropped during the summer of 2024. Where the year before there were 174 responses from June-August, the highest three-month total in history, that figure dropped to 120 over the same period one year later – the lowest three-month total of 2024. Furthermore, the 56 calls for June and July last year were the fewest for those two months since 2020.
However, the order of responses hasn’t changed over the years. Information dating to 2019 reveals that falls led the field then, with 75 for the year – comprising 21.1 percent of all calls. That figure dropped in 2020, as did the percentage of responses (19.2 percent), but falls again were the leading cause for emergency responses.
Photo by Clark Judge
