BALANCING AMBULANCE CREW WORKLOADS VIA A TIERED DISPATCH POLICY

• Autor(a) principal: Li,Xun
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Outros Autores: Saydam,Cem
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Pesquisa operacional (Online)
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0101-74382016000300399
• topic: EMS; dispatching; call priorities; simulation

ABSTRACT Emergency Medical Services (EMS) system’s mission is to provide timely and effective treatment to anyone in need of urgent medical care throughout their jurisdiction. The default dispatch policy is to send the nearest ambulance to all medical emergencies and it is widely accepted by many EMS providers. However, sending nearest ambulance is not always optimal, often imposes heavy workloads on ambulance crews posted in high demand zones while reducing available coverage or requiring ambulance relocations to ensure high demand zones are covered adequately. In this paper we propose a tiered dispatch policy to balance the ambulance crew workloads while meeting fast response times for priority 1 calls. We use a tabu search algorithm to determine the initial ambulance locations and a simulation model to evaluate the impact of a tiered dispatch policy on ambulance crew workloads, coverage rates for priority 1-3 calls, and on survivability rate for out of hospital cardiac arrests. We present computational statistics and demonstrate the efficacy of the tiered dispatch policy using real-world data.