PHONE CALLER OF PUNJAB EMERGENCY SERVICE (RESCUE 1122) AS 1ST RESPONDER: A NOVEL PARADIGM

Present research aims to establish the placement of phone caller of Punjab Emergency Service (PES, Rescue 1122) as 1st responder in the hierarchy of emergency-dealing units. In contrast to generally-considered 1st responder i.e. trained emergency personal; it is purely a novel paradigm. The telephone numbers of the phone callers, calling PES control room Sialkot city (Pakistan) during 1st February to 30th April, 2016 were collected from the same office after getting written departmental permission. A sample (n = 261) was selected using systematic sampling technique. Each participant was informed about the objective of the study telephonically before recording the responses in a pretested questionnaire. The questionnaire included 3 sections entitled socio-demographic characteristics, initial proceedings (included 8 items), and security & rescue (included 8 items). The items were measured on 5-point Likert scale, rating strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5). Results showed a comparatively higher frequency (67.4%, n = 176) of male respondents after SPSS-based statistical analysis. Most of the responses (93.9%, n= 245) indicated lack of first aid training. After chi-squared test, significant association (P= 0.0001) was noticed between gender and involvement-based loss minimization perception of the participants. Physical participation of the caller through initial proceeding in the scene and role in rescue activities was evident via highly remarkable values of normalized importance i.e. 100 and 62.2%, respectively using Multilayer perception neural network technique. Conclusively, the phone caller was found as 1st responder after its apparent importance in initiating emergency chain, physical participation in the emergency scene and the loss-minimization perception.