Designing Service Coverage and Measuring Accessibility and Serviceability of Rural and Small Urban Ambulance Systems

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. The proposed analytical model is compared to the gravity-based two-step floating catchment area method. The study found that the proposed model could efficiently identify under-covered and overlapped ambulance service coverage to improve service quality, timeliness, and efficiency. The spatial accessibility and serviceability identified with geospatial random events show that the model is able to plan rational ambulance service coverage in consideration of households and travel time. The model can be applied to both regional and statewide coverage plans to aid the interpretation of those plans.