Nursing is evolving into new fields of health care including ambulance care, where a branch of specialist nursing is growing. Various views exist on the desired competence for the ambulance nurse and valid guidelines are lacking in Sweden. To increase knowledge of the field, professionals were asked to describe what competences an ambulance nurse should possess. The aim of this study was theref...

OBJECTIVES Whether traffic remoteness from health care service in rural areas influences usage of ambulance service has not been well investigated. This study aimed to evaluate the relation between remoteness to health care facilities and incidence of ambulance calls in rural areas of Japan. METHODS We analyzed 155 rural communities of Hiroshima. Data were obtained on all ambulance dispatches...

In this paper, the development of decision support tools for dynamic ambulance relocation and automatic ambulance dispatching is described. The ambulance dispatch problem is to choose which ambulance to send to a patient. The dynamic ambulance relocation problem occurs in the operational control of ambulances. The objective is to find new locations for some of the ambulances, to increase the pr...

The risk of occupational death is disproportionately high for emergency medical services (EMS) personnel, largely as a consequence of the high incidence of transportation-related fatalities. The purpose of this narrative review is twofold: to raise awareness in the EMS community by examining the various factors that contribute to vehicular EMS injuries and fatalities and to outline practical st...

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Our study is concerned with the development of an Emergency Medical Services (EMS) ambulance location and allocation model called the Time-based Ambulance Zoning Optimization Model (TAZ_OPT). This paper presents the framework of the study. The model is formulated using the goal programming (GP), where the goals are to determine the satellite locations of ambulances and the number of ambulances ...

BACKGROUND To estimate the cost-effectiveness of an ambulance-based referral system an dedicated to emergency obstetrics and neonatal care (EmONC) in remote sub-Saharan settings. METHODS In this prospective study performed in Oromiya Region (Ethiopia), all obstetrical cases referred to the hospital with the ambulance were consecutively evaluated during a three-months period. The health profes...

BACKGROUND Intravenous tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) is an effective treatment for acute ischemic stroke if administered within a few hours of stroke onset. Because of this time restriction, tPA administration remains infrequent. Ambulance use is an effective strategy for increasing tPA administration but may be influenced by geographical factors. The objectives of this study are to invest...

This paper proposes a novel approach to analyze potential accessibility to ambulance services by combining the demand-covered-ratio and potential serviceability with the ambulance-covering-ratio. A Geographic Information System (GIS)-based spatial analysis will assist ambulance service planners and designers to assess and provide rational service coverage based on simulated random incidents. Th...

We propose a regression approach for estimating the distribution of ambulance travel times between any two locations in a road network. Our method uses ambulance location data that can be sparse in both time and network coverage, such as Global Positioning System data. Estimates depend on the path traveled and on explanatory variables such as the time of day and day of week. By modeling at the ...