Information Handling in Dynamic Decision Making Environments

In this paper we describe our observations about information handling in the complex and dynamic decision making environment of ambulance control, more formally known as Emergency Medical Dispatch. Our findings suggest that the information handling capacity of individual dispatchers and of the system as a whole is affected by the difficulties they face in handling information, and this is exhibited in an increase in the time taken to activate ambulances as workload levels increase. We identified 18 information handling difficulties from which we extracted 12 information design features that are expected to improve the information handling ability of the dispatchers in this study.