In addition to reactive and preventive measures aiming at reducing the likelihood of traffic accident occurrences, improvement of emergency rescue service is an essential factor in the traffic accident casualty's survival or degree of recovery. The major objective of this paper is to evaluate the emergency medical service rescue times for road accident casualties in Jordan. To achieve this objective, data on rescue time components were obtained from Civil Defence centres in four governorates; including Mafraq, Irbid, Jerash, and Ajloun. Response, rescue, and ambulance journey times of about 1800 emergency cases were analyzed in this study. These important variables were computed for urban and rural areas. Results of analyses indicated that the average response times for urban and rural areas were 6.7 and 11 min., respectively. These values are approximately equal to the acceptable standard levels in USA. The average rescue times in urban area were found to vary from 16 to 30 min.; while in rural areas the corresponding values were 27 to 39 min. Compared with cited literature the rescue times for rural areas are considered to be very long. Also, it was found that only 72 per cent of emergency calls are really in need of ambulance service. In urban areas, the average busy time was found to be less than 1 hr. In rural areas, the maximum average busy time was 72 min. Finally, the average busy time was found to be approximately twice of the average rescue time for rural and urban areas (A). For the covering abstract of the conference see E217780.
Abstract