Emergency Medical Services

Introduction

This site displays data on emergency medical services (EMS) in Alabama, based on information from the Office of Emergency Medical Services in the Alabama Department of Public Health. The data have been enhanced by adding attributes related to urban/rural classification and aggregation based on counties and primary care service areas. According to the report Ambulance Deserts: Geographic Disparities in the Provision of Ambulance Services, published by the Maine Rural Health Research Center, an area that is more than 25 minutes from an ambulance station (based on the road network) is an ambulance desert. Here are some other important statements from that report:

• Emergency medical services are based in a variety of organizational structures: they may be owned privately or by a county or municipality, based in fire departments or hospitals, and include air medical transport, emergency medical dispatch, or non-transporting services.
• Ambulances can be staffed by people with a variety of skill levels, spanning paramedics with the highest scope of practice and training, advanced emergency medical technicians (AEMTs), emergency medical technicians (EMTs), and emergency medical responders (EMRs). EMRs typically do not transport patients.
• Ambulance staff work either in advanced life support (ALS) or basic life support (BLS) agencies. Paramedics and AEMTs are ALS practitioners, and EMTs are BLS practitioners. The practitioners may be paid or volunteer.
• Many rural ambulance crews are comprised of volunteer EMTs.
• Ambulance services are reimbursed by Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial insurers, but only if the patient is transported.
• The delivery of ambulance services has not been systematically integrated into the health care system, particularly in rural areas.

User Interface

Our data are displayed in the form of interactive maps and tables. The maps generally have point or area layers that can be added or removed with the layer control on the map. The user can zoom in and out of a map and move about in the usual way. Zooming in reveals additional features such as small towns and then streets and roads. A click on the home button returns the map to its origional location and scale. The zoom to area button allows the user to zoom to a selected rectangular area of the map. Clicking on an object in a layer shows summary data for that object.

The interactive tables can be sorted by any field, by clicking on the header for that field. The buttons at the top allow the table data to be copied to the clipboard, in tab-separated text format, printed, or downloaded in various formats (tab-separated text, Excel, or PDF). With the search bar, the table can be filtered according to a text string.

In the interactive tables that display geographic point or area data, you can click on a row to select an object and see the object highlighted in the map. You can select as many rows as you wish. Click on a selected row again to de-select and remove the highlight.

Limitations

The information and data presented in this project are provided as a service to the educational and healthcare communities. No warranties are expressed or implied as to the correctness or usefulness of the material. The project should be viewed as a snapshot in time, specifically spring 2024. Inevitably, the further from this date, the less accurate the data will be. In the case of EMS, an additional limitation is important, since an EMS provider may have mutliple stations. Unfortunately, the Alabama Department of Public Health does not publish additional data on the stations of a provider. Such information would be important for understanding areas of need, and in particular for determining EMS deserts.