Reducing emergency arrival time by 10mnts can save a third of road deaths

WASHINGTON - Spanish researchers have concluded that by reducing the time between an accident taking place and the arrival of the emergency services from 25 to 15 minutes, risk of death can be reduced by one-third.

“The average wait after an accident until the emergency medical services arrive is 25 minutes in Spain”, Rocio Sanchez-Mangas, co-author of the study and a researcher at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), tells SINC.

Her research is based on information taken from the database records of the Directorate General for Traffic (DGT), which contains exhaustive information on accidents, and another DGT study from May 2004, containing information about the time at which accidents take place, the calls made to the emergency services and their arrival at the accident site.

Combining these two databases provided a sample of 1,463 accidents that took place on Spanish roads.

The authors estimated the probability of death according to the time required for the emergency service response, and the particular characteristics of the victims and the accidents themselves.

When other factors were taken into account, “a reduction in the wait from 25 to 15 minutes is associated with a decline of one-third in the death rate, both on motorways and highways, as well as on conventional roads”, the authors claim.

The result has been published in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention. (ANI)