ArticleEpidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.)2025
Does Delayed Response Due to Busy Ambulances Impact Risk of Death and Hospital Service Use?: A Cohort Study of 240,000 Medical Emergencies.
Article in Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.), 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Delays in Initiating Ambulance Transport Following Emergency Patient Referral to Mulago National Referral Hospital.Cureus · 2026Article
- Assessment of clinical and logistical contribution in a Norwegian helicopter emergency medical service using integrated data: a retrospective observational study.Scandinavian journal of trauma, resuscitation and emergency medicine · 2026Observational
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesWhen ground ambulances are busy with any task, delays are likely for concurrent emergencies. Whereas time-critical conditions are affected by delays, general impacts remain unclear. We aimed to assess how delayed ambulance response due to busy ambulances affects risk of death and use of hospital services.
methodsWe studied individuals with out-of-hospital emergencies that precipitated a call to the medical emergency number in Central Norway from 2013 to 2022. Emergency service and hospital data were linked to assess subsequent death and hospitalizations. We addressed potential bias by multivariable adjustment and a natural experiment: For emergencies that occurred in the same area at similar times, we compared outcomes for patients with differences in busy ambulances to analyze delays in response that were arguably unrelated to prioritization due to the patient severity.
resultsAmong 239,320 acute emergencies, 4.1% of patients died within 7 days. An interquartile range of variation in the probability a busy ambulance was associated with a 2.9-minute delay (95% confidence interval [CI] = 2.8, 3.0). Overall, a 5-minute delay was associated with a risk difference of 0.10 percentage points in the risk of death (95% CI = -0.17, 0.36) and 1.24 for hospitalization (95% CI = 0.59, 1.94). The cost of hospital treatment within 1 year increased by 616 euros (95% CI = 183, 1069).
conclusionWhile we found no substantial increase in the overall risk of death associated with delayed ambulance response, the observed rise in hospital costs suggests a potential increase in morbidity.
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