2020, Vol. 3, Issue 2, Part A

author(s)
Karpagam K, Nithya Manogaran and Velayutham P

abstract
Emergency Medical Services (EMS), generally known as ambulance services, provides medical transport and/or out-of-hospital medical care to patients at scenes of incidents or to people who are in need. Countries differ in their approaches to designing and operating EMS. In general, an EMS system receives requests for ambulances via a central emergency telephone number. The demand is examined to identify the severity and urgency (or priority) before one or more suitable vehicles are dispatched to the scene. The goal of EMS is to increase the chance of survival for patients. To this end, time plays an important role, especially in cardiac arrest cases. The last proxy is also called coverage rate and is a widely-used measure of EMS performance. Many EMS systems are found to base their performance standards on coverage. Such a coverage standard can require at least 80% of emergency calls have response times under 10 minutes. The present study aims to assess the knowledge and perception of ambulance service among people living in Poonamalle. A descriptive cross sectional research design was conducted among 60 elderly population in Poonamalle. A simple random sampling technique was used to select samples. Self-structured questionnaires were used to collect demographic data, knowledge and perception regarding ambulance service was assessed. The present study also shows that demographic variables of age 18–25 were 35%; 25–40 were 21%; 40 – 60 were 35 %; above 60 % were 8 %. Gender of male were 55 %; female were 45 %. Educated were 63 %; uneducated 36 %; Marital status Married were 58 %; unmarried were 42 %. Occupation, self-employed 23 %; Industrial worker 21 %; Student 25 %, house wife retired 20 %. Religion Christian 23 %, Muslim 26 %, Hindu 33 %. The studies thus indicates that out of 60 samples, 25 (41.7%) had inadequate knowledge, 25 (41.7%) had moderate knowledge and 10 (16.7%) had adequate knowledge.