Minimising emergency response time of ambulances through pre-positioning in Dhaka city, Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

This study conducted a large-scale survey in Dhaka, Bangladesh; the survey involved 95 major hospitals, more than 3000 emergency room patients, and 2 of the largest ambulance operators. Currently, most ambulances are parked within the vicinity of hospitals and are either dispatched or fetched by the acquaintances of the patient on demand, resulting in lengthy round trips. Reducing the response time of ambulances would certainly improve the emergency service, and pre-positioning of the ambulances could be a solution to reducing the response time. This study used two approaches to address the problem. First, the location-allocation problem was solved to find the optimal number of ambulance locations by maximising the demand coverage. Second, separate location-allocation for the peak and off-peaks, using K-means clustering, was applied to systematically optimise the ambulance positioning in small clusters near demand points. These approaches could substantially improve the existing emergency response time. Distributing ambulances near demand points yielded greater improvements in response time than when the ambulances are stationed near hospitals.

KEYWORDS:

• Emergency medical service
• response time
• ambulance
• location-allocation
• pre-positioning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Meilinda F.N. Maghfiroh http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4228-1544

Moinul Hossain http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1178-9516

Shinya Hanaoka http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0462-0149