The Experts and the Public Disagree about When to Call an Ambulance
When a baby has a stiff neck and a high fever [signs of meningitis] or an elderly person starts slurring their words without being under the influence of alcohol [signs of stroke] it’s time to call an ambulance ….. [B]ut 53% of Britons responding to a survey said there was no need to call emergency transport for the meningitis scenario and only 25% would call an ambulance for the stroke…
On the other hand, almost 50% thought a woman in labor deserved such a ride to the hospital —just one of many scenarios found to be illustrative of inappropriate use of ambulances.
Full article on when to call an ambulance.
Since it’s all free, it doesn’t matter who thinks what.
Ditto Ken. Passengers have no reason to care what experts think.
If people pay for their own ambulance ride, none of this matters.
People also disagree with the experts on whether they should go to the emergency room at all. About half of all visits are judged unnecessary.
Don’t experts and the public disagree about a great many things?
In Britain the NHS uses ambulances to take seniors to the drug store to get their meds. In John Goodman’s book on the NHS he estimated that there was one ambulance ride every year for every two people in the country.
Hello Dr. Goodman,
I am a medical student and I just ran across the statistic in my neuroscience textbook that the United States has an infant mortality rate twice that of, say, Hong Kong. To what can we attribute this?
Is there a better place for me to ask this question?
Leland
This is the kind of question that needs to be discussed ahead of time. OK, so we can’t predict all emergencies, but stroke and heart attack symptoms deserve an ambulance call. It’s also wise to know, in advance, location of the nearest urgent care center and retail clinic. That way, you know where you’re going when the kitchen knife slips or flu sets in on a weekend.
Hello Leland: I don’t know about Hong Kong, but most developed countries have infant mortality rates lower than ours. The reason is not because they have better health care systems. The most important reason is: most other countries have homogeneous populations and we have a very heterogeneous population. If you want to properly compare the United States with Europe, for example, you should compare Americans of European descent with Europeans, not all Americans with Europeans.
All this and more you can find in our book, Lives at Risk.
The British ambulance service is basically a free taxi service.
@Leland: By birthweight, the US infant mortality rate is among the lowest in the industrialized world.
The reason the US does badly on the OECD infant mortality rankings is that there are different national definitions of what is considered a live birth. Very low birthweight babies that are at high risk of death are counted as live in the US. The are considered DOA in other countries. A country’s infant mortality statistics look a lot better if one classifies very low birth weight babies as dead on arrival.
This has been known since the 1990s. Seems like you are wise to check the kind of “facts” they are telling medical students these days.
Nick Eberstadt (AEI) in his book, The Tyranny of Numbers: Mismeasurement & Misrule, does a good job of explaining why the U.S. infant mortality rate is higher than other industrial countries.