A US National Study of the Association Between Income and Ambulance Response Time in Cardiac Arrest | Cardiology | JAMA Network Open | JAMA Network

A US National Study of the Association Between Income and Ambulance Response Time in Cardiac Arrest | Cardiology | JAMA Network Open | JAMA Network





Good morning, folks! Megan here, back from vacation and ready to get you ahead of the day's news in health and medicine. 

Ambulances take longer to arrive in low-income ZIP codes

(JAMA NETWORK OPEN)

A new analysis suggests that cardiac arrest patients who live in low-income areas might have to wait longer for an ambulance than their peers in wealthy areas. Researchers looked at 63,000 cardiac arrest calls in 2014 and broke them down by the median income in a given ZIP code. After controlling for other factors, the researchers found it took nearly four minutes longer for an ambulance to arrive in low-income ZIP codes than in high-income areas. “Given that whether or not a patient survives cardiac arrest can depend on a matter of minutes, even small delays in EMS response times may negatively alter patient outcomes,” the authors write.