Emergency medical services in France

Emergency medical services in France and Luxembourg are provided by a mix of organizations under public health control, with the lead taken by a central control function called SAMU, which stands for Service d'Aide Médicale Urgente or Urgent Medical Aid Service. This central hub is supported by resources including first response vehicles or ambulances provided by the fire service or private ambulance services with or without a physician-led car provision from SMUR (Service Mobile d'Urgence et Reanimation – literally translated as Mobile Emergency and Resuscitation Service) which are "mobile intensive care units" (MICU) that have one or more physicians on board.

A law in 1986 defined SAMU missions as hospital-based services providing permanent phone support, choosing and dispatching the proper response for a phone call request. The central component of SAMU is the dispatch centre where a medical regulation team of physicians and assistants has the task of:

Because of aggressive triage (called medical regulation), only about 65% of requests to SAMU actually receive an ambulance response. Current performance on emergency calls is arrival at scene within 10 minutes for 80% of responses, and within 15 minutes for 95% of responses.

This means that SAMU controls a variety of resources within a community from general practitioners to hospital intensive care services.

SAMU is organized at the 'Département' level, with each Département organizing its own service, each of which is identified with its département's unique two-digit number code, for instance SAMU 06 in Nice and SAMU 75 in Paris.

Additionally, two SAMU have specific tasks :

In addition to the mainland French Departments, SAMU also operates in most of the offshore North and South American Départements, such as Guadeloupe (SAMU 971), Martinique, Guyane or Pacific and Indian French Islands (Tahiti Reunion).

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