If your answer was the nurses and staff at the assisted living residence, you would be wrong.

In most instances, a call is made to the county’s 9-1-1 dispatch center and the closest fire/medic unit responds.

Olympia Fire Chief Larry Dibble said his firefighters/paramedics are responding to an average of three or four “patient assist” calls at assisted living centers every day of the week.

It’s a drain on emergency services and jeopardizes the ability of firefighters and paramedics to respond to what Dibble calls, “real traumatic emergencies.”

Fire officials are caught on the horns of a dilemma. They can continue to spend their time helping patients back into bed, or they can try to find a way to help those patients, and others who call the Fire Department repeatedly, an alternative source of assistance.

Dibble and his team have opted for the latter approach and will be working to implement an FDCares program which was developed by the Kent Fire Authority. It helps steer frequent callers toward other resources such as social services, even providing those callers with medical supplies to prevent many of the calls to the department. The Olympia City Council agreed last month to pay the Kent Fire Authority $5,000 to license the program.

Asked why the nursing assistants and other staff members at the assisted living centers can’t help their own patients back to bed, Dibble said, “The Fire Department is always the default. We get the call every time.”

“These are people who paid their taxes for years and years so it’s hard not to go and help them,” Dibble said. “The time you don’t respond, they’ll die.”

Trying to pressure the assisted living centers into using their own personnel to help patients has not worked. The assisted living lobby is huge, Dibble said. “It’s bigger than the fireworks lobby.”

Olympia Fire Department, of course, isn’t the only agency facing this problem.

Dibble said Puyallup fire officials started charging the assisted living facilities for each emergency call. The fee was then passed on to the patients who are sometimes spending $5,000 to $8,000 a month for their care, Dibble said.

What happened in Puyallup?

“The gray panthers attacked City Hall,” Dibble said. Critics filled up City Hall council chambers and the elected officials backed off the fee for service.

“We’re trying to find a more cooperative way to do things here,” Dibble said.

Make no mistake, the three or four daily runs to assisted living centers is not the only problem. Individuals are overtaxing the system too.

Take, for example, the Olympia woman whose caregiver left each day at 3 p.m. The calls to the fire department started at 3:01 p.m., Dibble said. The woman was calling eight or 10 times a day. That’s right, eight to 10 calls for assistance each day. Sometimes it was to chase the bats out of the attic of the home, at other times it was a plea for companionship to battle her loneliness.

What fire officials were able to do was to work with the Department of Social and Health Services to get the Olympia woman a full-time caregiver. The calls to the Fire Department have stopped, saving eight or 10 emergency runs a day. Similar attempts with a handful of other frequent callers have been equally successful, Chief Dibble said.

That’s why the Olympia Fire Department wants to move to the FDCares program – to attack the underlying problems of frequent 911 callers so the fire agency can reduce the number of medical calls they are responding too.

It’s a great strategy.

While Kent pioneered this effort in 2010, it’s still too early to have statistical data on the program’s impact.

Mitch Snyder, a battalion chief at the Kent Fire Authority who runs its FDCares program, said he has noted a 75 percent reduction in 911 responses from people who called frequently.

Surely the managers of South Sound’s assisted living centers can be part of the FDCares program and help find a common sense approach to their continued reliance on public resources.

We have high hopes for the Chief Dibble and his crew’s efforts to put the FDCares program into place.