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Using Red Lights and Sirens for Emergency Ambulance Response: How Often Are Potentially Life-Saving Interventions
Prehospital Emergency Care
|July 18, 2020
Summary
Emergency Medical Services (EMS) rarely perform potentially life-saving interventions (PLSI) despite frequent use of red lights and sirens (RLS). Data suggest a need for targeted RLS strategies to improve patient outcomes.
Area of Science:
- Emergency Medicine
- Public Health
- Health Services Research
Background:
- Emergency Medical Services (EMS) commonly use red lights and sirens (RLS) for 911 calls.
- RLS use is linked to increased collisions and injuries among EMS personnel.
- Evidence for targeted RLS response strategies is limited.
Purpose of the Study:
- To determine the frequency and nature of 911 calls leading to potentially life-saving interventions (PLSI).
Main Methods:
- Analysis of over 5.9 million 911 calls from a national EMS electronic health record database (2018).
- Abstraction of RLS use, call nature, and interventions performed.
- Definition of PLSI included interventions, medications, and critical hospital notifications.
Main Results:
- 85.8% of calls involved RLS, but only 6.9% resulted in PLSI.
- Cardiac arrest calls had the highest PLSI frequency (45.0%), followed by diabetic emergencies (37.0%).
- Epinephrine and glucose were the most common PLSI administered.
Conclusions:
- Widespread RLS use in EMS is not consistently associated with PLSI.
- Findings support developing targeted RLS response strategies to optimize EMS resource allocation.
- Further research is needed to refine guidelines for RLS utilization based on call nature and potential for life-saving interventions.
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