The concept of Dispatch Life Support was defined the same year by the National Association of EMS Physicians. With the advent of Managed Health Care, Dispatch Life Support will be more important that ever to retain the PSAP as the primary triage point for medical emergencies. In a relative sense, I think it's been quite successful, especially given the fact that it really changed a paradigm that the dispatchers were not clerks. They weren't just people who got an address. We had an untapped resource there.
Dispatch evolves slower that other aspects of public safety.
I think some reasons for that is that it's a hybrid in many places. People are employed in public safety, mainly by police departments, and yet they are considered to be medical people from the viewpoint of their performance and standards. That's a difficult role for them, because they have to wear multiple hats, and that makes it more difficult to be able to obtain the specific training and ongoing education that's required. The medical-legal issues have never really surfaced. Those were boogiemen we were afraid of just like the Good Samaritan statutes - when someone finally looked, there'd never been a case in 48 states against a Good Samaritan, but we still passed laws to protect them.