Emergency medical services in Ethiopia: Drivers, challenges and opportunities

Ethiopia has a well established health care system but lacks significant improvements on emergency medical services and suffers a shortage of equally initiative among all regional states and city administration of Ethiopia. This study aimed to examine the drivers, challenges, and opportunities of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) and to identify new evidence for future policy making in Ethiopia.

A narrative review of the literature related to EMS was undertaken to describe the drivers, challenges, and opportunities for EMS in Ethiopia from July, 2000 to September, 2018. The search was done from four relevant electronic databases: MEDLINE, Science Directs, Scopus and PubMed by using Google Scholar and Google with key search words used mainly as "Emergency Medical services in Ethiopia". The inclusion criteria were an original study or review studies involving Emergency Medical Services in Ethiopia. Among the available papers, the relevant articles were selected while the irrelevant ones were excluded.

There was lack of trained emergency medical providers and misdistribution of trained professionals, immaturity of the program, lack of partnership and stakeholders and lack of motivation towards Emergency medical services. Emergency medical services hamper significant problems similar to other African countries that required being addressed in Ethiopia context for achieving the program and in order to obtain intended outcomes for the country.

A long-term discussion is needed to further improve the services system in various health care facilities. An Emergency Medical services policy making and analysis framework is needed to make quality emergency medical care at Emergency department in hospitals and outside the hospitals.