What to Say When You Call 911 for Chest Pain or Stroke

The 911 call is a piece of first aid, and it is the one nobody practises. People rehearse compressions and bandages and then freeze on the phone, handing over the information in the order it occurs to them rather than the order that is useful.

Dispatchers work to a script for a reason. The first few answers determine which vehicle is sent and how quickly, and that decision is often made while you are still talking. Everything after that is care instructions and updates. Know the shape of the call and you can front-load the parts that get an ambulance moving, then stop worrying about the rest.

There is one thing worth settling before the order itself. Calling 911 does not put you at the back of a queue for being unsure. Dispatch would far rather send a crew to someone who turns out to have indigestion than have a family spend forty minutes deciding whether this counts.

Here is the order that works, and the reason each piece sits where it does.

The order that gets a crew moving

Address first, before you describe anything. The street address, the community, and then the detail that finds the door: unit number, buzzer code, which building in the complex, the gate code, the fact that the house number cannot be read from the road at night. Say it before the emergency. If the call drops after your first sentence, the address is the only thing that still helps anybody.

Then the problem, in one line, not a history. A man of sixty two with chest pain and sweating, started about twenty minutes ago. Age, sex, main complaint, one key associated symptom, time of onset. For a suspected stroke it might be a woman of seventy, her face drooping on the right, her speech slurred, and she was completely normal at eight this morning. That last clause is the most valuable sentence in the whole call.

Next, whether they are awake and breathing. This is the fork in the script. Awake and talking sends the call one way, unresponsive and not breathing normally sends it another, immediately, and the dispatcher will begin coaching compressions down the phone. Answer plainly, and if you are unsure whether the breathing is normal, say you are unsure rather than guessing yes. Following that coaching is far easier if you have already knelt beside a manikin with an instructor. already knelt beside a manikin with an instructor.

For chest pain, what to say and what to leave out

Say the onset time, whether the discomfort is constant or coming and going, whether it began at rest or during effort, and whether anything like it has happened before. Say whether the person has known heart disease, a stent, or a bypass, and whether they carry nitroglycerin. Say the medications, blood thinners in particular. If you can get the bottles into one bag while you talk, do that, because it saves the crew a search they would otherwise do at the bedside.

Leave out the narrative. Nobody needs what they ate, the argument earlier, or the full sequence of the afternoon. Answer what is asked, briefly, and let the script run. The abruptness is not rudeness, it is a set of decisions that were made long before your call. If you want to test yourself on which details actually matter, you can work through scenarios with the tutor between courses rather than reread a list. work through scenarios with the tutor between courses.

For a stroke, the time is the whole call

Give the last known well time and be ready to defend it. Not when the symptoms were noticed. The last moment anyone saw the person behaving completely normally. If they woke like this, say what time they went to bed and whether anyone saw them during the night. Say whether they take a blood thinner, and say plainly if you do not know, because an unknown is safer than a wrong answer.

Say the symptoms in plain language. Which side, whether it is the arm or the leg or both, whether the speech is slurred or the words are simply wrong, whether one side of the face is not moving. Give nothing to eat or drink. Do not let them go and lie down until it passes, which is the most common way an hour disappears.

Before you hang up, do the housekeeping. Unlock the door and turn the outside light on. Put the dog in another room, because a crew negotiating a frightened dog loses minutes it cannot get back. Send someone to the street if the address is hard to find. Stay on the line until the dispatcher releases you, and if anything changes, particularly if the person stops responding, say so straight away. If you want your staff to rehearse this call rather than read about it, ask us about running a session at your workplace and we will build the phone call into the day. ask us about running a session at your workplace.