Physical Infrastructure Assessment for Emergency Medical Response

Abstract

The performance of an emergency medical service (EMS) depends on the existing infrastructure and allocation of medical resources. It is challenging to implement an efficient EMS owing to the spatial complexity of the population and geographical layout within urban areas. Management of ambulance headquarters and hospitals, which are part of the physical infrastructure, should be assessed to ensure a timely response. The objective of this research is to propose a general assessment process for a prehospital EMS by evaluating the physical infrastructure. A geographic information system is adapted to visualize and analyze the EMS of a region EMS from various perspectives. In the assessment process, the EMS is evaluated with incident data and the transportation network is evaluated through spatial and temporal analyses such as service area, clustering, and spatial interpolation. As a case study, the process is applied to New Taipei City for the assessment of its prehospital EMS. The results have shown that the proposed assessment process can help discover existing deficiencies and offer suggestions to the current EMS. Regions less accessible by the EMS were discovered; the spatial coverage of historical demand incidents was 93.8% for the union of ambulance headquarters and 70.52% for the union of hospitals in their respective 3 km service areas. Cluster analysis suggested an EMS performance gain of 0.68% compared with the current situation for the construction of an additional ambulance facility and 1.45% for an additional hospital. Future work will extend the proposed process with specialized spatial and temporal data mining techniques and to apply the process to more case studies.