The Advanced Medical Priority Dispatch System (AMPDS), is an Emergency Medical Dispatch

Emergency medical dispatch

Emergency Medical Dispatch refers to a system that enhances services provided by Public Safety Answering Point call takers, such as municipal emergency services dispatchers...

 (EMD) system developed and marketed by Priority Dispatch Corporation. AMPDS is primarily used in the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, where it is medically approved. The developer has similar products for police and fire.

AMPDS provides a unified system used to dispatch appropriate aid to medical emergencies, It includes systematized caller interrogation and pre-arrival instructions. The caller responses are used as inputs to gain a main response output category - A (Immediately Life Threatening), B (Urgent Call), or C (Routine Call). This can link to a performance targeting system such as ORCON

Operational Research CONsultancy

ORCON was developed by a UK consultancy company in 1974 as a standard for monitoring ambulance service performance....

 to match call metrics to their targets, such as category response time. For example, in the United Kingdom, calls rated as 'A' on AMPDS have an 8 minute responder-on-scene target.

Each call is also assigned a sub-category or code, often used as a means of gathering further statistics

Statistics

Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....

 about performance. It also helps when analysing the calls for how the call was described by the informant, compared to the injury

Injury

-By cause:*Traumatic injury, a body wound or shock produced by sudden physical injury, as from violence or accident*Other injuries from external physical causes, such as radiation injury, burn injury or frostbite*Injury from infection...

 or illness

Illness

Illness is a state of poor health. Illness is sometimes considered another word for disease. Others maintain that fine distinctions exist...

found when the crew attend. This can then be used to help improve the questioning system which gives the AMPDS classification. Each category is also referred to by a number from 1 (abdominal pain) through 32 (unknown). This is usually used for brevity and privacy over the radio. In some areas instead of the A, B, C categories, A (alpha) through E (echo) are used.