Understanding the Impact of Accessibility and Weather on Emergency Unit Reaction Times

Abstract

The provision of medical care in cases of road crashes is among the most defining elements in trauma handling. A characteristic evidence is the identification that people involved traumatic accidents that are handled within the first hour after the event (a period frequently termed as the “Golden Hour†) exhibit significantly decreased morbidity and mortality, exposing the importance of reaction times in cases like severe road crashes. Moreover, in emergency services management, especially for large-scale urban conglomerations, the improvement/reduction in reaction times stands for one of the top priorities, which is subject to a number of complexities, uncertainties, burdens and constraints. In this research, reaction times in cases of road accident emergencies in urban networks are investigated, particularly correlating important features that affect them, such as location accessibility, type of emergency/accident and environmental conditions (in this case weather). The methodological framework comes from the field of spatial econometric modeling, and in particular in spatial error models (SEM), which are able to take into consideration spatial relationships, that in turn may capture location-specific relationships, weather effects or other significant elements and provide detailed results on reaction times for alternative cases of emergency. The application is performed over a suitable metropolis case, namely, the urban area of Riyadh, KSA, while the results offer valuable insight that can be exploited for a meta- analysis aiming at improving the system’s performance.