AUSTIN (KXAN) — Austin-Travis County EMS (ATCEMS) Chief Robert Luckritz said 911 calls don’t just come in for major emergencies anymore.

“911 has evolved from just calling for life-threatening emergencies to calling for assistance,” he said.

He doesn’t want to discourage people from calling 911 when they need help, but he said he recognized this new normal means he has to reorganize the agency’s workflow. Previously, he said, when you called 911 and asked for EMS, the department would automatically dispatch the closest ambulance to you.

“Now we’re going to take a few seconds or a minute longer to find out what is the real resource that you need,” he said. While that adds more time on the front end, Luckritz said it has contributed to keeping response times to the highest priority calls on target.

“We can’t send an ambulance to individuals to people who may not have life-threatening injuries, making those ambulances unavailable for those life-threatening emergencies,” he said. “We’ll send something other than the closest ambulance. It might be an ambulance from further away to keep that local ambulance available for a life-threatening call. Or we might send a community health paramedic or a PA.”

Firefighters typically won’t go to low-priority calls, but they do assist EMS on major medical calls.

Like EMS, the Austin Fire Department can also struggle to get to certain parts of town, but AFD hopes to fix that problem soon.

“We’re going to be opening Station 53 in Goodnight Ranch,” said Assistant Chief Tom Vocke with the Austin Fire Department. “And then later in the year we also anticipate opening Station 54 in northwest Austin.”

According to data AFD provided KXAN, average response times in the department’s service region were about 10 minutes in 2023. Their target is getting to 90% of calls in eight minutes.

“In the downtown area, we hit that eight minutes every time,” he said.