Rural Americans wait nearly twice as long for emergency medical service personnel to arrive at the scene of an emergency than individuals in urban or suburban areas, according to a research letter published in JAMA Surgery.
For the study, researchers analyzed deidentified emergency medical service records for emergency prehospital encounters from 485 EMS agencies nationwide in 2015. Researchers labeled the encounters as rural, urban or suburban based on 2014 U.S. Census Bureau's categorization by zip code.
Of a total 1.8 million encounters, 1.6 million occurred in suburban settings, 150,779 occurred in urban areas and 70,189 occurred in rural regions.
Among all patient encounters, EMS units had an average response time of seven minutes. This figure jumped to 14.5 minutes for rural settings, with 1 in 10 individuals waiting nearly 30 minutes for EMS personnel to arrive. EMS teams arrived in an average of 7.7 minutes in suburban areas and 7 minutes in urban areas.
"Longer EMS response times have been associated with worse outcomes in trauma patients," researchers concluded. "In some, albeit rare, emergent conditions … even modest delays can be life-threatening."
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