The Effect of Ambulance Response Time on Cardiovascular Severity and Mortality

Abstract:

Ambulance providers devote vast resources to minimizing the time that it takes them to attend the scene of an accident. However, existing empirical evidence reports no meaningful effects of ambulance response time on out-of-hospital patient's health conditions. I revisit this question using rich and comprehensive administrative data from the Liguria Emergency Medical System. I identify causal effects by exploiting variations in the amount of hourly rainfall in the municipality in which the ambulance performs the mission. Contrary to previous evidence, I find a large and strongly significant effect: a one minute increase in response time (3.6% at the sample average) increases the probability of severe conditions by 1.5 percentage points (3% at the average) and increases the likelihood that the patient dies by 0.7 percentage points (17.5% at the average). Finally, I estimate the willingness to pay of policymaker to improve the performance of the service given the costs and the benefits involved, and I discuss and rank several policies.