Case Study - Hereford & Worcester Ambulance Service

As well as having ACTIVE Total Solution Mapping™ installed, Hereford & Worcester Ambulance Service employed ACTIVE to assist them with the creation of a Tactical Deployment Plan to help achieve challenging new emergency response standards.

Using ACTIVE Total Solution Mapping™ to identify demand hotspots by day of the week and hour of the day, and ACTIVE Travel Time Boundaries™ to model the emergency response from a given location to the demand hot spots, ACTIVE determined locations where ambulances should be placed for short periods of time in order to be close to where demand is predicted at that time. Firstly, this exercise established that anyone in the two counties could be reached within 19 minutes, and thereafter that over 75% of Category A (life threatening)calls could be reached within 8 minutes, the most important new standard.

Using software tools specifically designed for the job, ACTIVE calculated the demand-based priority of each location for every hour of the week, and displayed these in the ACTIVE Tactical Deployment Viewer™. This is a tool which is used in the control room to give staff a guide when despatching resources, provide consistency no matter who is working in the control room, and to produce management reports showing the status of resources at any point in time

The Tactical Deployment Plan was one of the ingredients which saw the trust move from 68% response to Category A calls in 8 minutes in December 2000 to levels in excess of the new standards.