Time Indices of Pre hospital Emergency Medical Services: in Shahrekord County

Considering the importance of the role and function of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) in a society’s health and the need for continuously evaluating its function, especially in indices affecting the process of giving service to the patients, the present study aimed to compare time indices of providing services in EMS Shahrekord county in Iran. Methods and Materials: This study was a retrospective cross-sectional study. 600 calls, that had been resulted in patient transfer were randomly selected. Moreover, the required data were extracted from EMS forms that were filled by a medical emergency technician for each mission. Regarding to our results, the mean of delay time, response time, time to reach the scene, total of the 3 mentioned times, time to reach a hospital and total mission time were 0.01, 7, 8, 12, 17 and 50 minutes, respectively. There were only significant differences in time to reach hospital (t=3 and p=0.001) and total mission time (t=2 and p=0.009) in the studied periods. There were not any significant differences regarding other time indices. Time indices of EMS were desirable. It was the same level as national and international indices. Meanwhile, there were significant differences between two time indices namely time to reach hospital and total mission time in the years of 2015 and 2016. In contrast, there were no significant differences between the other time indices.