Hospital complaints about two ambulance runs by D.C. emergency crews last week illustrate the need to swiftly implement recommendations of a task force set up after the flawed response last year in the death of a journalist, the mayor’s office said Thursday.

The D.C. Department of Health is investigating charges by Howard University Hospital and Providence Hospital doctors that the fire department failed to properly assess two patients and follow protocol before bringing them to their emergency room doors. The Examiner first detailed those cases Thursday.

The incidents underscored the need for improvements outlined by the 13-member panel created as part of the settlement between the city and the family of slain veteran New York Times newsman David Rosenbaum, Carrie Brooks, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said. The retired journalist was brutally beaten outside his Northwest Washington home and died after emergency crews mistakenly thought he was drunk.

The task force called for increased training, more accountability and better pay for emergency responders to fix the professional and cultural divide between firefighters and emergency medical technicians. But the panel recommended that agency remain as one firefighter and EMS unit, a move criticized by the Federation of Citizens Associations and the emergency medical services union because they say firefighters are best used to fight fires and EMTs are best to handle medical emergencies.

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Seventy-five percent of the calls made by the D.C. fire department are medical calls.

Brooks said the incidents last Friday did not change the outcome of the patients’ conditions, but were the types of issues that the District will address.

In the first instance, Brooks said the fire department determined the firefighters should have notified Howard University Hospital staff that it was bringing in a high-priority patient.

Kenneth Lyons, head of the emergency medical services union, said the patient, a 50-year-old man who was first reported as being possible intoxicated, was left at the hospital emergency room after a cursory examination.

The triage nurse later found the man unresponsive and unconscious, foaming at the mouth and with an accelerated heart rate.

That same day, a doctor at Providence Hospital said an 82-year-old man should have been classified as a trauma patient and rerouted to a Washington Medical Center. But Brooks said that when the firefighters got to the trauma center they were told by doctors there that the patient wasn’t a trauma patient.

smccabe@dcexaminer.com