You are absolutely correct, and that option should not be forgotten.
Did the police van go to the police station, then upon finding Freddie unconscious, did they ferry him to the hospital ?
If so, did they just take him as he was, or did they attempt to move him ?
Well, it’s kind of complicated. Upon arriving at the station, they requested an ambulance.
The information Fire Dispatch got was “male with an arm injury”. Fire Dispatch had received an identical call at a nearby location two minutes earlier, and had dispatched an ambulance to it.
An injured arm call is not life threatening and FD apparently reasoned the efficient thing to do was to check the first scene, then divert the ambulance to the second location if, as they believed, the call was a duplicate.
When the ambulance reached the first scene four minutes after the call for Freddie came in, they found a patient there which told dispatch the calls were NOT duplicates, and dispatch then immediately sent a second ambulance, this time to the police station. The net effect of this confusion was a five and a half minute delay between getting the call for Freddie and dispatching the call.
That delay is partially offset by the fact that the second ambulance was nearby, and was on the scene in three minutes. In an ideal situation, though, had there not been near-simultaneous calls, and had the closest ambulance been dispatched, it would have gotten to Freddie five and a half minutes sooner.
When the medic unit arrived, they evaluated Freddie, and requested additional manpower for a non-breather. An engine and an EMS supervisor were dispatched to the station, and the medics subsequently worked on him for 17 minutes on scene. (That timing’s about right for starting resuscitation and fluids, getting the injury stabilized (Cervical collar), and packaging them for transport.) The prevailing theory these days is stabilize the patient, then transport, so that would have been appropriate care.
Somewhere in the course of that time period, he would have been carefully removed from the van and placed in the ambulance. The ambulance then transported him to the hospital, taking six minutes. Total time from the call from the station to arrival at the hospital was 35 minutes.