85. Locating emergency response volunteer centers
Contributed abstract in session FB-3: Healthcare Logistics /2, stream Regular talks.
Friday, 11:00-12:30Room: Room S2
Authors (first author is the speaker)
| 1. | Niki Matinrad
|
| Department of Science and Technology, Linköping University | |
| 2. | Tobias Andersson Granberg
|
| Science and Technology, Linköping University |
Abstract
Many sparsely populated areas experience poor emergency services coverage. To address this issue, fire and rescue services (FRS) in Sweden have started volunteer initiatives. In these, civilians (volunteers hereon) are trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), first aid, and required actions when a person first arrives at a fire, traffic accident, or drowning incident. In the event of an emergency, these volunteers are alerted through a short message service (SMS), or via an app, on their mobile phones, simultaneously with the dispatch of professional emergency services. Due to limited budget, equipment, and manpower, it is impossible for professional emergency services to include and train too many civilians in the volunteer initiative. Therefore, it is important to determine where the volunteer centers should be located, that is, which regions should be selected for inclusion in the volunteer initiative. This decision is not always straightforward to make. Thus, we propose an optimization model to determine where the volunteer centers should be located to obtain the best possible emergency coverage. We use the area of a large FRS organization in Sweden, which currently has 20 FRS stations, as our use case. The results show that including volunteer centers will improve the emergency response coverage. More interestingly, the optimal solutions with two volunteer centers, were selected for implementation by the FRS organization–recruitment and training are ongoing.
Keywords
- Decision support
- Healthcare logistics
Status: accepted
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