what is the improvement factor of life expectancy before the ambulance versus life after the ambulance?

Question

I want to know what's the improvement (in percentage) of life expectancy before the ambulance compared to life after the ambulance, and where I would go to find out information. Statistically, how much longer do we live now as compared to when we had no ambulances.

Answer 1

Those statistics, even if you could find them would not reflect the efficacy of ambulances. The reason for this is that you cannot remove advances in treatment and diagnosis that are a significant factor. Life expectancy is also influenced by nutrition, immunization, education about being proactive concerning one's health, medications that control disorders and diseases, etc.

Bottom line, there are too many variables in your question to make any statisitic a valid indicator of how ambulances have increased life expectancy.

Answer 2

The problem is that ambulances didn't develop in a vacuum, but rather alongside many other advances in health care that had little or nothing to do with emergency medecine. In fact, chances are the impact that the development of EMS response vehicles has on actual life expectancy is very minor compared with, say, developments that greatly reduce infant mortality.

You'd also need to define 'ambulances' - they were using horse drawn carts to evacuate the wounded in Napoleon's army, technically an ambulance.

I suppose you could try to just do general research into life expectancy and correlate that to the dates of advances in ambulance development and use in the USA (or wherever), but I don't think the figures you would end up with would be very compelling 'proof' or 'evidence' of the effects of ambulances on life expectancy.