Determining minimum staffing levels during snowsto

Authors: Amber Kunkel Laura A McLay

Publish Date: 2012/07/25

Volume: 16, Issue: 1, Pages: 14-26

PDF Link

Abstract

Emergency medical services EMS provide lifesaving care and hospital transport to patients with severe trauma or medical conditions Severe weather events such as snow events may lead to adverse patient outcomes by increasing call volumes and service times Adequate staffing levels during such weather events are critical for ensuring that patients receive timely care To determine staffing levels that depend on weather we propose a model that uses a discrete event simulation of a reliability model to identify minimum staffing levels that provide timely patient care with regression used to provide the input parameters The system is said to be reliable if there is a high degree of confidence that ambulances can immediately respond to a given proportion of patients eg 99  Four weather scenarios capture varying levels of snow falling and snow on the ground An innovative feature of our approach is that we evaluate the mitigating effects of different extrinsic response policies and intrinsic system adaptation The models use data from Hanover County Virginia to quantify how snow reduces EMS system reliability and necessitates increasing staffing levels The model and its analysis can assist in EMS preparedness by providing a methodology to adjust staffing levels during weather events A key observation is that when it is snowing intrinsic system adaptation has similar effects on system reliability as one additional ambulanceIt is a pleasure to acknowledge Battalion Chief Henri Moore Jr Chief Fred C Crosby II and Mr Lawrence Roakes of the Hanover County Fire and EMS Department in Hanover County Virginia for the knowledge experience and data they provided to support this research effort This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No CMMI1054148 Any opinions findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation The authors would also like to thank Dr J Paul Brooks at Virginia Commonwealth University for reviewing a draft of this paper and the anonymous referees for whose comments led to a significantly improved paper

Keywords: