Elderly Patients Most Likely to Use Ambulances for Transport to Ers, Critically Ill Latinos Least Likely to Arrive by Ambulance

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WASHINGTON, June 14 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Patients with Medicare or Medicaid, the uninsured, the elderly and the critically ill are the heaviest users of ambulances for transport to the emergency department, making them most vulnerable during periods of ambulance diversion. The results of a study of more than 30,000 patients taken to emergency departments by ambulance were published online Friday in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("At-Risk Populations and the Critically Ill Rely Disproportionately on Ambulance Transport to Emergency Departments").

"The most surprising and somewhat disturbing finding in our study was close to half of critically ill patients come to the ER on their own, without ambulance transport," said lead study author Benjamin Squire, MD, of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. "It has shed a whole new light on how dangerously ill some of the patients in the waiting room are. When a patient comes to the emergency department by ambulance, he is being monitored continually, which is not the case for a patient coming in on his own. This finding changed my view of triage."

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Elderly Patients Most Likely to Use Ambulances for Transport to Ers, Critically Ill Latinos Least Likely to Arrive by Ambulance

Only 57 percent of critically ill patients (defined as intubated, dying later in the emergency department, or transfe...

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