Emergency Medical Performance: Why and How Should We Care?

This research investigates the effect of Emergency Medical System (EMS) services on patient conditions. In the first chapter of the thesis, I study the causal relationship between the ambulance response time and patient’s severity and mortality rates. I address the problem of endogeneity due to reverse causality by exploiting the hourly amount of rainfall as instrument for the ambulance response time. In the second chapter, I investigate the inefficiency due to the problem of patients’ localization. I perform the analysis at the level of each ambulance mission, and I adopt a difference-in-differences identification strategy to clear the effect of interest by the compounding effect of other unobservables that may correlate with the effect of interest. Finally, in the third chapter I study how the productivity of care providers working in the emergency department changes when the end of shift is approaching.