Ambulance deserts exist in all but one of Louisiana’s 64 parishes

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Access to ambulance services varies significantly across the nation, and Louisiana fares worse than most, according to a recent study.

All but one of the state’s 64 parishes contain a census block in an ambulance desert, where residents are more than 25 minutes outside of an ambulance service area, the Main Rural Health Science Research Center found.

Almost 179,000 people in Louisiana live in ambulance deserts. Louisiana has the 10th highest population outside of  ambulance service areas  out of the 41 states researchers examined. Two states were excluded from the study because of data limitations, and seven states didn’t have the data.

That means 7.8% of Louisiana’s population is in an ambulance desert. That’s in the ballpark of other nearby states: 9.7% in Texas and Alabama, 6.4% in Mississippi and 12.2% in Arkansas.

Southern states have the highest rates of ambulance deserts, especially in the Appalachian region. Rural areas are generally more likely to have a higher percentage of their populations far from ambulance service areas, the study found. About 4.5 million people nationwide live in ambulance deserts, with 2.3 million in rural areas.

Of those living in ambulance deserts in Louisiana, 36.7% are in rural areas. That puts Louisiana and much of the South on the lower end of this spectrum. In some other states — such as Ohio, New Hampshire and Nebraska — more than 90% of those in ambulance deserts are in rural areas.

Compared with other states, Louisiana has some of the lowest numbers of ambulance stations relative to its population. It ranked 13th worst on this metric, with 5.5 ambulance stations for every 100,000 people.

The state also ranks 18th lowest in the number of ambulance stations compared with its size, with 5.9 stations every 1,000 miles and a total of 256 ambulance stations.

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