Abstract
The correct estimation of ambulance travel time is an extremely important issue from the perspective of healthcare and the security of citizens. In some events, the threat to the health or life of an injured person increases with each minute of waiting for an ambulance. The authors of this article analyzed how ambulances travel throughout the entire Lesser Poland voivodeship in southern Poland. Based on the analysis of 300 million GPS records that were collected over several years from 300 ambulances, real ambulance speed characteristics were compiled for the most important cities in the region. The obtained results regarding ambulance speed characteristics were used to understand the correlation between ambulance speed, the density of the road network, and the built-up areas of a given city. Furthermore, the impact on the speed of ambulances of traffic, time of day, day of the week, or the season was also examined. The influence of the use of ambulances’ lights/sirens on travel time was also examined. The culmination of the research was the presentation of the theoretical foundations of coverage maps and a method of implementing them based on the determined speed characteristics. The presented studies show that the speed at which ambulances move is a very local phenomenon. Also, a relatively constant average speed of ambulances throughout the whole week was found. Moreover, a difference in speed between signaled and non-signaled ambulance trips was observed. The speed characteristics that were obtained were used as input data for the development of dynamic coverage maps, which are an invaluable tool for supporting the decisions of ambulance dispatchers.
Highlights
Emergency medical services (EMS) are widely considered to play one of the most important roles in healthcare systems, but time is a vital factor in saving the health or life of patients to whom an ambulance has been called
The increase in the number of cars has caused traffic jams and a dramatic decrease in road capacity. This is confirmed by an article in which the authors analyzed ambulance travel times in Singapore [16], and nowadays this is one of the most important problems affecting emergency service vehicles
The following chapter consists of two parts: the first is a detailed description of the dataset used to determine the speed characteristics of ambulances; the second part covers the analysis, in which the speed of non-emergency trips, ambulance calls, differences in day, week, month and year are compared
Summary
Emergency medical services (EMS) are widely considered to play one of the most important roles in healthcare systems, but time is a vital factor in saving the health or life of patients to whom an ambulance has been called. The increase in the number of cars has caused traffic jams and a dramatic decrease in road capacity This is confirmed by an article in which the authors analyzed ambulance travel times in Singapore [16], and nowadays this is one of the most important problems affecting emergency service vehicles. Understanding that how ambulances move is highly dependent on local conditions and is not the same as how civil vehicles move indicates that the speed models embedded in commercial or open-source software may differ from ambulances’ actual movement patterns in a given locality This in turn may lead to underestimation or overestimation of ambulance travel times. This paper investigates (1) whether ambulance speed can be uniform for a locality; (2) if there are groups of similar velocities; (3) what factors determine which city belongs to which group
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