I've always heard that "95% of the calls we go on aren't real emergencies." While this has been supported by my experience, does anyone know of any studies or journal articles on this subject?
Not sure if there is EMS data, but I know of some some from the ED side, which I would expect has a similar, or maybe even less severely ill, patient population.
Some papers question the conventional wisdom that there are so few urgent patients...I suspect the more recent ones were written in part as direct response to threats from states (going off memory, but I think Washington at least proposed this) to stop paying for ED visits for conditions they (retrospectively) determined were "non-emergent" The short version is it's probably tricky to declare lots any given patient "non-urgent" before the workup in the ED has actually been completed.
I've always heard that "95% of the calls we go on aren't real emergencies." While this has been supported by my experience, does anyone know of any studies or journal articles on this subject?
It's going to vary from place to place and how you define "emergency". To be honest, I don't think there is any specific research that has attempted to quantify the proportion of EMS calls that are "emergencies". There has been a number of studies looking at dispatching criteria and its ability to predict something like "ALS intervention". From those studies, you can usually determine an approximate percentage that are emergencies.
