【Aging, safety net and fiscal crisis in Japan】No.237: Reform of the ambulance dispatch system

As shown in Figure 1, the number of dispatched ambulances increased by 30% from 5.10 million in 2008 to 6.61 million in 2018. The average time taken for an ambulance to arrive at the site of an accident and transfer the patient to a hospital has also increased from 35.0 minutes to 39.5 minutes. As a result, the emergency organizations are always busy. As mentioned in Column No. 93, one possible reason is that the system of triage that tracks patients' symptom levels when calling an ambulance is insufficient.

Figure 2 shows the percentage of patients with mild symptoms in ambulance dispatches in Tokyo. This percentage reached 60.3% in 2006, making it difficult to maintain an ambulance dispatch system. Therefore, Tokyo established an ambulance relief center called "7119", which is a program that allows residents to call a specialist in case of sudden illness or injury. Following the introduction of the 7119 program, the percentage of mild patients in Tokyo dropped to 51.6% in 2013. However, it has been rising again recently, which suggests that many citizens are unaware of the 7119 program. For example, the total number of ambulance dispatches in Tokyo was 726,428 in 2018, but the number of cases using the 7119 program was 201,943 (28%). Although the percentage of people using the 7119 program in Tokyo remained low at 43.9% in December 2019, the government recommends implementing it in other prefectures.

Figure 1 Number of ambulance dispatches and time of ambulance arrival to hospital

Figure 2 Percentage of patients with mild symptoms in emergency transportation in Tokyo