A Survey on the Yazd Pre-hospital Emergency Medical Service's Performance Assessment, 2009-2010

Pre-hospital care has an important role in the management of critical patients. The more this management is appropriate, accurate and rapid, the less there is mortality and morbidity. It is there fore imperative to assess the current status of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) in to improve its performance. Three measures that can be considered in such assessments are the status of EMS staffing and equipments and more important, the response time of EMS system. This study had a main objective to survey these measures in Yazd pre-hospital EMS stations and to compare them with the existing standards. In a descriptive, analytical and cross- sectional study, we surveyed all 7 EMS stations of Yazd. We extracted the staffing status and the ambulance equipments trough checklist and compared them with reference standards. Also, we surveyed 11961 run report forms from all stations that had been submitted to central station during 2008-2009. By using Excell software and descriptive statistics (percent, cumulative distribution and standard deviation),we calculated fractile response times for Yazd EMS and compared it with reference standards of Iran and North America. The results of the study showed that Yazd EMS system has major deficiencies in terms of staffing and access to advanced EMS equipments. Based on the results, only 1 station (14/3%) had sufficient staff. Also, none of the ambulances had the necessary equipments required for critical patients’ management. Despite these deficiencies, 81/15% of response time was within 8 minutes, a reference standard for EMS. We concluded that the majority of call services in Yazd EMS have been responded in a suitable time interval compared with reference standards and country's approved EMS response time goal. Although, response time is an important factor in reducing morbidity and mortality in emergencies but deficiencies of personnel and equipments can affect the effectiveness of delivered services. There fore improving in staffing and equipments is an inevitable necessity to reach the goal.