Poison hotline celebrates 10 years of saving lives throughout North and Central Florida

When Lisa Lumley dialed the Florida Poison Information Center/Jacksonville hotline, she didn’t realize it would be the most important phone call of her life.

Lumley’s 6-year-old son Keith had been acting strangely all morning, then confessed he’d eaten some pills from the medicine cabinet.

“He didn’t seem very ill, but I called the hotline anyway,” Lumley said. “I wasn’t sure which pills Keith had taken, so they said to bring him to the emergency room.”

At the hospital, Lumley was told Keith had ingested diabetes medication that lowered his blood sugar. After Keith was stabilized, she learned her son had almost died.

“That hotline literally made the difference between life and death,” she said.

The arrival of summer now brings a steep increase in calls to the center, which just celebrated its 10th year of serving residents in 42 North and Central Florida counties stretching from Pensacola nearly to Orlando. Director Jay Schauben said summer is one of the peak seasons for poisoning incidents because children are out of school and sometimes encounter toxic products, animals and plants while exploring their homes and yards.

With its counterparts in Tampa and Miami, the Jacksonville center provides poison control information to Florida residents through a national toll-free number, 1-800-222-1222, that automatically connects callers to the nearest poison control center.

“When the phone rings, we have to be ready for anything,” said Schauben, also a University of Florida clinical professor of medicine and pharmacy. “In the summer, we average 200 calls per day, ranging from emergency-department physicians making treatment decisions to parents asking which houseplants are safe around small children.”

Ninety percent of hotline calls concern accidental exposures, but surprisingly, most of these situations can be handled safely at home. The center, located in the Shands Jacksonville hospital complex, does not offer walk-in services, but operates the hotline 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, Schauben said.

“The average call to our hotline costs the state $17, and may prevent an unnecessary hospital visit that costs thousands of dollars and ties up critical resources,” he said. “For every dollar spent on our program, we save the people of Florida $7.75 to $9 in health-care costs.”

Hotline calls are handled by specially trained health-care practitioners who can advise callers on more than 500,000 chemicals using various resources and databases, he said. Three board-certified clinical/medical toxicologists also are on call 24 hours a day to help with unusual challenges.

“What we really offer is expertise,” Schauben said. “Someone might call us and say, ‘My child drank Lysol.’ There are 35 Lysol products, some of them are harmless and some are very dangerous. We have the ability to determine what the product is, what chemicals it contains and what to do about it.”

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Jacksonville center and other poison control facilities have enhanced their ability to provide immediate public alerts and marshal resources to deal with large-scale events involving chemical or biological weapons. Every three minutes, the Jacksonville center transmits case data from all three Florida centers to a national database in Washington, D.C., where they are monitored for any unusual or suspicious poisoning trends.

With all the vital services the three centers perform, it’s difficult to believe they came about only after a 20-year struggle for funding.

In 1973, M. Peter Pevonka, M.S., R.Ph., then a UF College of Pharmacy assistant professor, was inspired by responses to the university’s Drug Information and Pharmacy Resource Center hotline and conceived the notion of a statewide system of professionally staffed poison control centers.

“Then as now, it seemed like a great idea,” said Pevonka, who currently directs the College of Medicine’s research affairs office. “But turning the idea into reality required a substantial capital investment that took a lot of time and effort.”

Working with Gerold Schiebler, M.D., former UF chairman of pediatrics, Pevonka developed a base of supporters and diligently lobbied the Florida Legislature to fund the project. In 1984 the project received its first real allocation, but it wasn’t until 1992 that the Jacksonville center became operational. The latest state appropriations of $1,436,874 and new federal grant funding of $405,000 enable the center to continue full force.

Later this summer, Schauben said, all three Florida centers will be linked to the same database and will usher in a new era of expanded educational services.

“If we do our jobs correctly in teaching the public, we should have fewer exposure cases to deal with, which is good for everybody,” he said. “Yet it’s very difficult sometimes for us to get out in person and visit 42 counties. Distance education technology will let us bridge that gap.”

The expansion is supported by federal grants, including $80,000 earmarked for promotion of the service next fiscal year. “We’re going to make sure Floridians know what we have to offer,” he said. The Florida Poison Information Center/Jacksonville is a cooperative effort of the UF College of Medicine, Shands Jacksonville, the UF Health Science Center/Jacksonville and the Children’s Medical Services division of the state Department of Health.