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Guadalupe ÁlvarezPh.D. student (Cybernetics)Instituto Tecnológico de Tijuana, México |
Featured Talk
Optimization of the ambulance location problem: a case of study in Tijuana.
Abstract
Globally, mortality rates due to injury or trauma remain unnecessarily high. The number of road traffic fatalities (1.25 million in 2013) is stabilizing, despite the worldwide increase in population and the use of motor vehicles. Half of all fatalities caused by traffic accidents are pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists. Death rates for traffic accidents in low- and middle-income countries are more than double those in high-income countries.
The population in Tijuana is approximately 1.6 million inhabitants. Currently, the Red Cross of Tijuana (RCT) has 11 ambulances in service and 8 ambulance bases, this means that there is one ambulance for every 145,000 inhabitants, while smaller cities in the USA by the 1990’s already hadround one advanced life support ambulance per 51,000. Nevertheless, the RCT covers about 98% of the requests for emergency medical services (EMS) received by the city, providing medical attention to 37,000 people in 2013. The lack of resources, and their suboptimal use, is evident when we consider that the average response time of RCT ambulances was approximately 14 minutes with a standard deviation of 7 minutes. These performance measures are discouraging.