Title	How to improve the patient dispatch of emergency medical system in Hong Kong?
Authors	Tsang, Oi Sz Tsui, Ying Ki Charity Lai, Kit Yan Yeung, Hoi Man
Advisors	Pang, King Wah Anthony
Degree	Undergraduate
Issue Date	2016
Absctract	Process of Emergency Medical System (EMS) in Hong Kong mainly includes how Fire Service Department handle enquires, dispatch ambulance to the hospital selection for patients’ conveyance. The current EMS in Hong Kong is discovered to be inefficient owing to the imbalance hospital selection for conveyance causing long waiting time. In the light of the existing insufficiencies, a new EMS mechanism for call-in patients is proposed. Starting by call centre receiving ambulance requests, it is recommended to adopt MPDS early so as eliminate conveyance of patients who do not need the ambulance service. In addition, a respective response time for ambulance dispatch will be set for different critical level of patients, so that resources could be allocated to prioritized patients at the right time. Furthermore, mechanism of hospital selection for conveyance will consider more factors that affects the expected total waiting time. Factors include utilization rate of different hospitals, travel distance and critical level of patients. Implementing this proposed system, it is expected that the efficiency of Accident and Emergency (A&E) department of the public hospital can be enhanced and thus the service quality. 2050 data was simulated to compare the expected waiting time of current and proposed EMS. It is found that implementing the proposed EMS could help reduce the waiting time by 22.8%. Nevertheless, information sharing between relevant authorities is a prerequisite for enhancing efficiency and effectiveness of the EMS in Hong Kong.
Subjects	Emergency medical services -- China -- Hong Kong Medical emergencies -- China -- Hong Kong
Publisher	Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Rights	All rights reserved.