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The aim of this article was to analyze the timeliness of emergency medical care (time transpired between the injury and the first contact with the Emergency Medical System) and its assocation with different negative health outcome in traffic accident victims treated at two Mexican hospitals, one in Guadalajara, Jalisco, and the other in León, Guanajuato, based on data from the Motor Vehicle Accident Epidemiological Surveillance System of the Bloomberg Philanthropies' Global Road Safety Program. Information was obtained on all patients treated for motor vehicle injuries in referral hospitals from May 2012 to November 2014. Multinomial logistic regression was used to model the health outcomes, categorized as short stay, prolonged hospitalization, disability, and death, compared to timeliness of care, adjusted by different target variables. A total of 2,575 patients were analyzed. Time from injury to care was 103.74 minutes (± 231.36) in León and 75.37 minutes (± 156.87) in Guadalajara; it was 38.02 and 36.23 minutes, respectively, in patients that received prehospital medical care. Timely care was associated with less prolonged hospital stay, but not with lower incidence of disability or death. Receiving prehospital medical care was associated statistically with negative health consequences. Timely care was associated with lower probability of prolonged hospitalization. Strategies are needed to evaluate and in turn improve the technical quality of prehospital medical care, including timeliness of care and adequate regulation.

In Mexico, out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is a health problem that represents 33,000 to 150,000 or more deaths per year. The few existent reports show mortality as high as 100% in contrast to some international reports that show higher survival rates. In Queretaro, during the last 5 years there were no successful resuscitation cases. However, in 2012 some patients were reported to have return of spontaneous circulation. We report in this article 3 cases with return of spontaneous circulation and pulse at arrival to the hospital. Two of the patients were discharged alive, one of them with poor cerebral performance category. Community cardiopulmonary resuscitation, early defibrillation and better emergency medical system response times, are related with survival. This poorly explored health problem in Queretaro could be increased with quality and good public education, bystander assisted cardiopulmonary resuscitation, police involvement in cardiopulmonary resuscitation and defibrillation, public access defibrillation programs and measurement of indicators and feedback for better results., (Copyright © 2013 Instituto Nacional de Cardiología Ignacio Chávez. Published by Masson Doyma México S.A. All rights reserved.)

Objective: Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OCHA) is a public health problem in which survival depends on community initial response among others. This study tries to analyze what's the proportional cost of enhancing such response by involving the police corps in it., Materials and Methods: We analyzed retrospectively an OCHA registry started on June 2009. We contrasted a model with limited number of ambulances and police based first response., Results: Mortality was 100%, response times high and 10.8% of the victims were receiving cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) by bystanders. In 63.7% of the events the police arrived before the ambulance, in 1.5% of these cases the police provided CPR. The cost for each saved life was of 5.8-60 million Mexican pesos per life with only ambulance model vs 0.5-5.5 million Mexican pesos on a police first response model with 12 ambulances., Conclusions: In Queretaro interventions can be performed taking advantage of the response capacity of the existing police focused on diminishing mortality from OCHA at a lesser cost than delegating this function only to ambulances.