Joy Kong, MDRegenerative Medicine Physician, Educator, and Entrepreneur

90% of 911 Calls Are Part of a Broken System

31 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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In this personal narrative, a firefighter‑paramedic recounts how his early idealism about being a heroic first‑responder gave way to disillusionment after witnessing the reality of the emergency medical system. He explains that roughly 90% of the 911 calls he responds to are symptoms of a broken medical and social infrastructure. By repeatedly visiting the same patients’ homes, he observes a pattern where an initial acute‑illness call escalates to increasingly frequent calls—moving from once every six months to multiple times per week—until the patient dies. He notes that while medication prescriptions multiply, patients’ lifestyles remain unchanged: the same diet, lack of exercise, and unchanged living conditions persist. This exposure to the interior of homes provides him with a vivid view of social determinants of health, highlighting how the system focuses on pharmacological treatment without addressing underlying lifestyle and environmental factors. The speaker frames municipal EMS as a unique lens that reveals systemic failures, arguing that the high volume of repeat calls underscores a healthcare system that treats symptoms rather than root causes.

Chapters

I wanted the most rewarding job ever. What wouldn't be a more rewarding job than being that quote-unquote hero firefighter paramedic? After several years, I found out that I was actually completely wrong. 90% of the 911 calls was me being part of the broken medical system. When you work for a municipality, the residents that live there, they get to know you. But the same way they get to know us as the firefighters, we get to know them when they're calling 911. You get to learn them. You go inside of their house, you see what's inside of their house, the food they're eating, the way they're living. And when you get that initial 911 call of that acute illness, You start to actually map out when's the next 911 call you get. We'd get this 911 call, this acute illness call. You get another phone call 6 months later. Then it goes from once every 6 months to once every other month, then once every single month, then once every other week. You're transporting to the hospital almost every single day until the day they die. And you just start noticing, you know, when you go to their homes, more medications being prescribed to them. Nothing's changing with their lifestyle. They're still eating the same thing. They're not moving their body. None of that's being addressed.