The call for help after an injury road accident

doi:10.1016/0001-4575(93)90051-W

Accident Analysis & Prevention

Volume 25, Issue 2, April 1993, Pages 123-130

https://doi.org/10.1016/0001-4575(93)90051-W Get rights and content

Abstract

How soon will the authorities receive a call for help after an injury road accident? In urban Missouri 70% of the calls were received in less than five minutes. But in rural Missouri only 34% of the calls came in that quickly. These figures are based on a merge of police and emergency medical services accident data in which the earlier of the two notifications is selected as the time of first call. Police estimates of accident time are used here to calculate the interval from accident to the first call. The police estimates lack precision. This is shown by the high percentage of rounded numbers. As averages, however, these estimates show little evidence of bias. In urban areas, delays are related to time of day and type of road system, while in rural areas, remoteness of location is an added factor. Difficulty in finding a telephone quickly in certain road environments can be a problem. However, installing more stationary telephones along roads may be inefficient. Large areas would have to be covered to insure even a modest reduction in delays. More thought, therefore, should be given to the use of innovative vehicle-to-satellite technologies.

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Citation Excerpt :
It is likely that this time refers to when the police officer was notified of the RTC (Imprialou and Quddus, 2019). The average interval between an RTC occurring and the police being notified is around 5–5.9 min (Brodsky, 1993; Blatt et al., 2009). For the current data, an RTC recorded 6 min after its occurrence would result in a change in solar altitude of between 0.6 to 0.9°.
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Effects of emergency medical services times on traffic injury severity: A random effects ordered probit approach
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Methods: The time required for EMS reporting, arrival, and transport to hospital was calculated by location type and roadway functional classification using 2016 Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data. Subsequently, an ordered probit model was developed to identify factors contributing to injury severity considering EMS time.
Results: The average time for the crash–reporting duration is 5.38 min, the reporting–scene arrival interval is 10.52 min, and the scene–hospital interval is 34.72 min. The average crash reporting and reporting–scene arrival intervals were the longest on conventional roads in rural areas and the shortest on conventional roads in urban areas. The average scene–hospital interval was longest in conventional rural areas and the shortest on freeways/expressways in urban areas. The developed random effects ordered probit model shows that prolonged reporting–scene arrival and scene–hospital intervals result in more severe injuries. The result also presents that crash type, violation, age, location, lighting condition, and alcohol/drug involvement have significant effects on injury severity.
Conclusions: The key findings from this study indicate that EMS times differ according to urban/rural location and road functional classification and that reporting–scene arrival and scene–hospital intervals have significant effects on injury severity along with various factors. It is expected that the findings from this study can be used to develop effective and practical strategic plans to minimize EMS reporting, arrival time, and transport to hospital and therefore decrease the traffic injury severity.
Evaluating adverse rural crash outcomes using the NHTSA State Data System
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Citation Excerpt :
While crash prevention is clearly the most cost-effective approach, the post-event, environmental cell of the Haddon Matrix is also important. Part of the increased crash mortality in rural areas may result from reduced access to an effective trauma care system integrated with local EMS (Brodsky, 1993; Muelleman and Mueller, 1996; Mueller et al., 1988). Specifically, this may involve delays in activating EMS or barriers in the transportation of injured persons to appropriate hospitals, but the relative importance of these systemic factors is difficult to separate from the effects of person-level or event-level factors.
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Older age, not wearing a belt, ejection, alcohol involvement, high speed, and early morning times were associated with increased risk of both severe injury and death. Controlling for these factors, and restricting analysis to persons who had suffered a severe injury, the adjusted odds ratio (aOR) associated with death was higher for counties classified rural (RUCC 6–7, aOR 1.23, 95% CI 1.16–1.31) or very rural (RUCC 8–9, aOR 1.31, 95% CI 1.18–1.46).
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Citation Excerpt :
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Mortality from traffic crashes is often higher in rural regions, and this may be attributable to decreased survival probability after severe injury.
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View full text

The call for help after an injury road accident

Abstract

Accid. Anal. Prev.

Soc. Sci. Med.

Geographic variations in mortality from motor vehicle crashes

N. Engl. J. Med.

Emergency medical service rescue time in fatal road accidents

Transportation Research Record

The new freeway motorist aid systems

Public Works

Stepwise logistic regression

Quantitative techniques in geography