Impact of ambulance dispatch policies on performance of emergency medical services

Abstract

In ambulance location models, fleet size and ambulance location sites are two critical factors that emergency medical service (EMS) managers can control to ensure efficient delivery of the system. The ambulance relocation and dispatch policies that are studied in dynamic ambulance relocation models also significantly contribute to improving the response time of EMS. In this paper, we review dynamic ambulance relocation models from the perspective of dispatch policies. The connection between the reviewed ambulance dispatch policies and real-life policies is highlighted. Our ambulance model is based on the modified maximal covering location problem (MCLP). It is used to examine the commonly used dispatch policy and the proposed method of free-ambulance exploitation to further improve urgent call response time. Simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce the response time of urgent calls, especially during low-ambulance-supply period. We also compared the performance of EMS with and without reroute-enabled dispatch.