The Trend of Prehospital Emergency Medical Care Services after the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Time Series Analysis

The COVID-19 epidemic in 2019 directly or indirectly had an impact on the healthcare system of hospitals. Iran was among the countries whose hospitals and especially the emergency system were affected by the outbreak of Coronavirus. The main objective of this study is to compare the number of emergency services, including heart and respiratory diseases, accidents, drowning, and CO poisoning, after the coronavirus pandemic in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari provinces.

In this study, after obtaining the necessary permissions, an attempt was made to analyze the data on the most common Emergency Medical Services (EMS) extracted monthly by the city from the ASAYAR system during 2020-2023 using time series and Auto-regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model.

The number of emergency services related to accidents had an upward trend and was based on seasonal changes. Examination of seasonal effects shows that most emergency services occurred in the months of June through September; the number of emergency services related to heart disease was relatively constant. In addition, the number of emergency services related to respiratory diseases was constant on average despite many fluctuations in the observations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of interventions and emergency calls increased.

Therefore, emergency services should increase their response capacity in these cases by modifying their programs and approaches, increasing response capacity and the number of staff, and providing appropriate training.