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Comment by vlian2088 | Hacker News Reader

vlian2088

the reverse side of that medal is that in 'most of the world' EMS quality is ass.

US EMS quality isn't exactly something to be proud of. It's been private equityified. Just recently (last winter) I nearly lost an aunt because of our stellar EMS system literally doing a transfer from a hospital to a hospice. The company had only one person working, they parked the ambulance next to a snow bank, tried to wheel my aunt up the snow bank, and had her and the bed flip on them trapping them in the snow.

They were super lucky that someone from the hospice just happened to be leaving at the same time they flipped the bed.

I think this argument is very disingenious for two reasons:

- If you’re comparing to developed nations (or some non developed ones with functioning agencies), the argument doesn’t hold true.

- If you’re comparing to the bottom of the barrel EMS (quality being ass like you said), you’re still not going bankrupt for an ambulance ride.

If you limit it to say the top 20 developed countries how does it look?

Just a quick Google indicates the UK, Germany, US, and Japan all have urban response times in the ballpark of 10 minutes.

And even then they do worse than the average half brained private driver on trauma calls, since for many medical issues speed trumps capability.

Haven't yet seen a developed nation do worse than the US. If you prefer to compare against developing countries only, sure, winning by lowering the bar to the ground is an option.

UK has had some atrocious response times.

Google is telling me that’s not the case… 7 minute target for life-threatening calls, with 90% actual within 15 minutes.

What metrics are you using for that? The US ranks fairly close to the top for out of hospital heart attack survival, which is a good proxy for emergency medicine in general.

The US also has decent EMS response times. If you adjust for population density, the US has fantastic response times.

In retrospect, I think my wording might be misleading - I didn't mean to imply the US is doing significantly worse than developed world, just that none of the developed world does significantly worse than the US either.

I.e. I was responding to the original "in 'most of the world' EMS quality is ass.", trying to say that you only get that outcome if you compare apples and oranges (developed vs developing)

8-10 minutes in urban areas is pretty much universal (for the developed world). Rural areas are where differences come in, and even there standards for the developed world are somewhat on the same level.

Well, here it is often ass AND expensive. I'd take ass and free over ass and expensive.

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