Abstract
Incidence of death and long-term disability of emergency patients could be reduced with prehospital
emergency medical service (EMS) utilization. Current reports indicated that emergency medical
services were used only 3.1 percent of cases in Thailand. This reflected that a review of causes related to
the use of pre-hospital EMS was urgently required. This research was then conducted to promote the EMS
utilization. After the review, 38 articles were found related to the topic, and the contents of 31 articles were
relatively relevant and credible with evidence-based data after verifying with rigorous methodology. Then all of the 31 articles were utilized in the process of content analysis. The findings indicated that
EMS utilization via 1669 hotline and others were related with various factors including population, socioeconomic
of the service users or relatives such as gender, age, education, marital status, income, and
vehicle ownership.
The important factors included attitude towards EMS, EMS past experience, social support, perception
on obstacles in using EMS, access to information, knowledge on urgent symptoms of EMS use, and
self-confidence on using pre-hospital EMS system. These findings may be used to develop further
research for promoting appropriate EMS utilization in Thailand.
