St John WA selects Omnitronics for ambulance dispatch

St John WA (SJWA), the largest ambulance service in the world in terms of geographical coverage, has commenced implementation of the omnicore Enterprise Dispatch system by Omnitronics, with the service now live with the State Operations Centre and across metropolitan operations.

With more than 236,000 hours of volunteer support, SJWA provides emergency medical services to the people of Western Australia. The not-for-profit organisation serves people day and night, through 17 different services and 196 ambulance locations across a state spanning over 2.5 million km² in size.

Since the first Omnitronics dispatch installation in 2008, SJWA has consistently upgraded to access the most advanced dispatch technology available on the market. Its third Omnitronics dispatch system, omnicore Enterprise Dispatch, went live in late 2023 and is hosted in virtual machines with a primary server in Belmont and a duplicate backup site 26 km away in Wangara, Western Australia. The system has greatly enhanced SJWA’s communication capabilities, highlighting the crucial role that technology plays in delivering efficient and effective emergency services to communities.

While all metro and country channels are using Tait base stations via the DFSI or 4-Wire E&M interface, a high availability omniGateP25 gateway cluster provides access to PTT over satellite for remote locations. This will give country ambulances in remote locations the capability of multiple communications paths based on priority, including radio channels, 4G connections or satellite.

In addition, a custom-developed CAD interface for omnicore Dispatch sends an alert and message for CAD job dispatch information directly to the user’s radios ensuring no job is missed when the paramedics are away from the in-vehicle CAD terminals. A voice recorder is also integrated into the system.

“As a longstanding client, we are happy that Omnitronics have once again provided us with the latest cutting-edge radio dispatch technology and support us in communicating with both local and remote sites from our centralised operations centres,” said SJWA Radio Communications Manager Ray Pullen.

Omnitronics CEO John Jordan added, “The capability to provide custom engineered functionalities for our dispatch systems gives users like St John WA the opportunity to design a system to their specific organisational requirements. We are pleased to be able to offer them exactly what they need, so they can focus on their mission: saving lives.”