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Review
. 2022 Nov 29;10(12):2391.
doi: 10.3390/healthcare10122391.

Prehospital Time Interval for Urban and Rural Emergency Medical Services: A Systematic Literature Review

Abdullah Alruwaili  1   2 , Ahmed Ramdan M Alanazy  1   2
Affiliations
Review

Prehospital Time Interval for Urban and Rural Emergency Medical Services: A Systematic Literature Review

Abdullah Alruwaili et al. Healthcare (Basel). .

Abstract

The aim of this study was to discuss the differences in pre-hospital time intervals between rural and urban communities regarding emergency medical services (EMS). A systematic search was conducted through various relevant databases, together with a manual search to find relevant articles that compared rural and urban communities in terms of response time, on-scene time, and transport time. A total of 37 articles were ultimately included in this review. The sample sizes of the included studies was also remarkably variable, ranging between 137 and 239,464,121. Twenty-nine (78.4%) reported a difference in response time between rural and urban areas. Among these studies, the reported response times for patients were remarkably variable. However, most of them (number (n) = 27, 93.1%) indicate that response times are significantly longer in rural areas than in urban areas. Regarding transport time, 14 studies (37.8%) compared this outcome between rural and urban populations. All of these studies indicate the superiority of EMS in urban over rural communities. In another context, 10 studies (27%) reported on-scene time. Most of these studies (n = 8, 80%) reported that the mean on-scene time for their populations is significantly longer in rural areas than in urban areas. On the other hand, two studies (5.4%) reported that on-scene time is similar in urban and rural communities. Finally, only eight studies (21.6%) reported pre-hospital times for rural and urban populations. All studies reported a significantly shorter pre-hospital time in urban communities compared to rural communities. Conclusions: Even with the recently added data, short pre-hospital time intervals are still superior in urban over rural communities.

Keywords: emergency medical services; on-scene time; pre-hospital time interval; quality of care; response time; transport time.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
PRISMA flow diagram showing the search strategy of the current systematic review.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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