A simulation study to improve the performance of an emergency medical service: Application to the French Val-de-Marne department

Lina Aboueljinane, Evren Sahin (), Zied Jemai () and Jean Marty
Additional contact information
Lina Aboueljinane: LGI - Laboratoire Génie Industriel - EA 2606 - CentraleSupélec
Evren Sahin: Ecole Centrale Paris, LGI - Laboratoire Génie Industriel - EA 2606 - CentraleSupélec
Zied Jemai: LGI - Laboratoire Génie Industriel - EA 2606 - CentraleSupélec

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: The French Emergency Medical services, which are known as SAMU (the acronym of Urgent Medical Aid Services in French), are public safety systems responsible for the coordination of pre-hospital care under emergency conditions throughout a particular geographic region. The goal of these systems is to respond in a timely and adequate manner to population calls, to provide first-aid services and to transfer patients to the appropriate care facility when needed. The current study aims to develop the process of the Val-de-Marne department's SAMU system (SAMU 94) in an efficient manner that meets the population's needs using limited resources. For this purpose, we propose a discrete event simulation (DES) model implemented in the ARENA software to analyze possible changes in the SAMU 94 processes that would lead to enhanced operational efficiency for coverage performance (i.e., the percentage of calls for which the patient wait time before a SAMU 94 rescue team arrives does not exceed a specific target time). Hence, the model enables to test five categories of scenarios that are mainly related to the level of resources used as well as the location of rescue teams throughout the service area. Among other results, we found that repositioning a portion of the existing teams into potential bases increased the 20-min coverage performance up to 4.5% in average. Furthermore, this improvement in coverage can reach 7.3% when the whole fleet is relocated based on the multi-period redeployment plan obtained from simulation optimization.

Keywords: Emergency medical services; Discrete event simulation; Decision support for healthcare; Service operations management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published in Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory, 2014, 47, pp.46 - 59. ⟨10.1016/j.simpat.2014.05.007⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01672390

DOI: 10.1016/j.simpat.2014.05.007

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().