Ambulance response time and emergency medical dispatcher program: a study in Kelantan, Malaysia.

This study provided data by a simple method of acquiring information related to ambulance response time (ART) and determined whether it met the international standards of ART. Additionally, this paper also compared the duration of ART at this hospital before and after the implementation of an Emergency Medical Dispatcher (EMD) program. The ART, which started when details like phone number of the caller, exact location of the incident and the nature of the main complaint were received and ended when the emergency team arrived at the scene of the incident. The parameters recorded include call processing time, time taken to prepare the team and time taken to travel to the scene. The results of the study revealed that the ART for the university hospital (HUSM) was at 913.2 +/- 276.5 seconds (mean +/- SD) and it was far below the international standard of ART as a benchmark of a good ambulance service. However, the study suggested that the EMD program that was recently implemented at the HUSM gave a significantly improvement to the ART score.