Back at work, checking my database--I'm showing Cleveland Regional 155.340 DPL 132, Kings Mtn Hospital DPL 134. But to actually talk to these hospitals you have to encode a DTMF sequence (or so I'm told). Our administrative vehicles are the only ones that have DTMF mics so that's no good. I could probably set up the sequence on our MCS 2000 radios sort of like MDC 1200 but considering that we only transport to Cleveland about twice per year and I don't think we've EVER transported to Kings Mtn, it wouldn't be worth the effort.
Iredell is still using UHF for patient notifications as best I can tell. My guys kept complaining to me that I had Iredell 340 programmed wrong, no one would answer them when transporting to Iredell Memorial. Checked, re-checked, tested, tested, finally made some calls and found out that they don't use or monitor 340 any more (or so I was told). And the only UHF radios we have are in the administrator vehicles.
Overall, 340 was a great tool when communications technology wasn't so "advanced". You turned to channel 3 on the old 4 channel radio, called the hospital, the transmission was recorded in the comm center, you switched back to channel 1 when you were through. If you went to an out of county hospital you looked their number up in the dial code book, dialed them in on your encoder and talked to the hospital.
Now, consider this--if we want to give a patient report via cell phone we have to call our comm center on one of two lines dedicated for this purpose. We tell the communicator to patch us to one of the two hospitals. The communicator then patches this call to the "bat phone" in the ED. This procedure is necessary to get the patient report recorded on the voice logger. Sometimes the patch disconnects early or the cell phone loses it's connection. Start all over again.
To call the Forsyth county hospitals you wind and wind the channel selector until you get to "Forsyth 340". You call Forsyth communications on this channel and request a patch to whichever hospital you're transporting to. Same with Mecklenburg county but you can also do this with 155.280 if you don't get an answer on 340. Overall, it's easier to call out of county hospitals on cell phones, looking their number up on the ever present "BAT PHONE" list that some motivated employee has compiled, distributed, and taped to the front wall of the ambulance (the REALLY motivated employees laminate their lists).
I've got about 15 340's programmed in our radios for any county we may transport to or transport through. A great tool but sometimes it's a pain to remember the rules for whichever county you're trying to use it in.
