This photo provided by the Seoul Metropolitan Fire & Disaster Headquarters shows an emergency patient transport by a 119 ambulance.
SEOUL, April 12 (Korea Bizwire) — Half of emergency patients with heart attacks, strokes, and severe injuries did not make it to the emergency room in time in the last five years, a lawmaker said Tursday.
According to a report submitted to Rep. Choi Hye-young of the Democratic Party by the National Medical Center, 49.1 percent of some 1.45 million patients who were sent to the emergency room at medical centers across the country between 2018 and 2022 did not make it in time.
The report deemed that patients with heart attacks should be transported to an emergency room within two hours, those suffering from strokes within three hours, and severe injuries within one hour.
The proportion of those who did not make it to the emergency room in time jumped from 47.2 percent in 2018 to 52.1 percent in 2022.
In particular, the proportion of patients with severe injuries who did not make it to the hospital in time jumped from 48.5 percent to 56.5 percent over the same period.
This indicates that 93,859 patients among the 166,247 patients with severe injuries took longer than one hour to make it to the hospital last year.
H. M. Kang (hmkang@koreabizwire.com)
