The Firehouse

Just finished watching SiCKO, the movie made by Michael Moore about the U.S. healthcare system, and how it stacks up against other countries such as Canada, France or even Cuba.

It brought back memories of a stay in New Hampshire a few years back with my family, during which our daughter came down with very high fever. We went to the local hospital’s ER around lunchtime, and had her through triage in around 45 minutes. Almost eight hours later, around 9pm, we decided to leave the waiting area and head back home, our daughter not having seen a doctor yet. It’s understandable that triage is used to classify emergencies, and that ours may well not have been anywhere near as critical as others there, but I have never, ever waited eight hours in a hospital to be taken care of.

In the UK, after I hit a car while biking (the dumbass opened his door without looking into the mirror as I went by), I was through the ER triage and an x-ray that cleared up any bone injury in less than two hours. Another time I stabbed my hand with the pointy end of a scissor (don’t ask), it took around three hours. For all this, I didn’t pay a penny.

When I had an accident in a French mountain in the Pyrenees, which resulted in a broken fib, I was x-rayed in less than 30 minutes after arriving at the ER. They determined I would need a steel plate to hold the bone, so they provided an ambulance, for free, which drove me to a Barcelona hospital, where the next morning I had the operation done. Again, not a cent for any of this.

What did the New Hampshire hospital triage cost? Just shy of $180! For sticking a thermometer into my daughter’s armpit and writing down our details!! I guess we did well in following the travel agent’s advice to get a good insurance plan for our trip, which covered the expense, no questions asked.

Michael Moore, while controversial and sometimes even manipulative of the facts to tell his story (which is not saying he lies or uses false information, just that he twists it to better represent his point), hits the nail on the head. Facts are facts, and no matter how much garbage you drop over them to cover the stink, it still rises and lingers.

Enough said.

I already wrote about the extreme lack of support for most of Bluetooth’s possibilities in the original iPhone, but it seems Apple has improved things a bit with the release of the iPhone 3G.

Looking over the PICS again, the Phonebook Server Equipment (PSE) mode in the Phonebook Access Profile (PBAP) is now supported, which means that phonebook download, browsing and other functions are available, but not contact uploads, which would require a Phonebook Client Equipment role in the profile. A very clear and simple explanation of PBAP can be found on Microsoft’s MSDN Library.

All this mumbo-jumbo means that carkits such as the Parrot MINIKIT SLIM can download and use the iPhone’s contact list for training-free speech recognition and dialing, which is very cool and works wonders! For those interested, PSE makes support for vCard 2.1 and 3.0 mandatory.

Additionally, Hands-Free Profile 1.5 is also supported on top of the much more limited Headset profile in the original iPhone. They still don’t support inband ringtones, for reasons that escape me, as it’s not like you can steal the ringtones in hi-def over speech-quality Bluetooth. In any case, a good step in the right direction!

We had a curious situation the other night. A driver left home and drove down some dirt tracks, following (the obviously wrong) directions his GPS navigator game him. Like I reported some time ago, these navigators sometimes include even horse trails as valid roads, and will try to take you down them if you’re not cautious.

Local Police Department received the call at 8pm, informing the driver was stuck in mud in an unknown location. He could see a railroad track which provided a first clue as to his whereabouts. Three units were dispatched to assist the officers searching for him. A while later, the control room talked with the driver directly, and he gave a set of coordinates that he managed to pull from his GPS navigator. We checked these but turned out to correspond to the point of departure (his home). The driver was found shortly after, before we could call him again and try to instruct him on how to get his actual coordinates from the GPS.

The main lesson learned from this: we are going to try and write a compendium of the steps needed to read the latitude and longitude from the most sold brands of GPS navigators. Looking back at some calls involving lost drivers or RTAs with undetermined location, such advice over the phone would have proven invaluable. I would recommend you study this protocol for your own departments, as one day you could find yourself in the situation where life depends on quickly finding a vehicle equipped with a GPS navigator.