A systematic literature review of ambulance turnaround time

Ambulance turnaround time (ATT) is important to assess Emergency Medical Systems (EMS) organization performance; its value determines the ambulance capacity of the operations system of an EMS institution and patient´s health risk due to the unavailability of ambulances. There are academic publications describing improvement projects conducted to reduce ATT; however, there is a lack of publications assessing the current literature available in this research field. Therefore, the purposes of this paper are (i) to assess the maturity of this research field and (ii) to identify the most valuable variables related to ATT. A systematic literature review (SLR) was used as a research method and bibliometric analyses were conducted to assess author characteristics, publication characteristics, and content characteristics. A total of 37 publications passed the exclusion criteria identified, finding: ascending trend in the frequency of publications per year, this research field has been addressed by few countries and authors, and there are several variables related to ATT. The application of SLR does not guarantee that all the important publications have been collected; however, several databases and an interrater agreement procedure were used to mitigate this limitation. Future work should include validating the variables identified related to ATT with empirical investigations.