Abstract
Ambulance service system plays a vital role in the
health and wellbeing of a civilized society. In a metropolitan city
like Karachi, several types of incidents occur daily which require
emergency response, so that the affected people may be
transported by ambulances to hospitals. There are various
ambulance services run by philanthropic societies in Pakistan that
perform their duty amicably. Edhi Foundation is one of the
largest ambulance services in Pakistan. Information provided by
EDHI foundation indicates that there are only three major
government hospitals i.e. Civil Hospital, Abbasi Shaheed Hospital
and Jinnah Hospital that provide their services to handle such
cases. However, the response and transit times of these
ambulances is hampered due to traffic jams, unavailability of
multiple ambulances at risk prone areas, lack of knowledge about
shortest routes and facilitating hospitals results in a higher rate of
pre-hospital deaths. Therefore, it seemed necessary to propose an
efficient emergency response system based on spatial distribution
of incidents and optimal utilization of road network. This study
aimed to highlight the spatial distribution of trauma-related
incidents along with Edhi ambulance coverage in Karachi. Data
of three most frequent incidents, i.e., road traffic accidents
(RTA), gunshots and blasts was collected for the period of July
2014 to December 2014 from Edhi foundation’s manual logs. This
data was converted from handwritten logs to a geodatabase. Edhi
ambulance posts in Karachi and major hospitals were also
mapped. Various analyses were performed on the geodatabase to
highlight the hot spot zones with recurring cases of incidents and
their town-wise distribution, along with the temporal trends of
various types of incidents. Recommendations were given to
reallocate the existing standby positions of ambulances to the
zones of higher incident rates, and to provide an optimized
response time for the ambulances to facilitate the cases using road
network coverage analysis. Out of coverage and distant areas of
Karachi are also identified using the results of this study.
Mehreen Saba, Amber Noor, Saad Malik. (2017) An Analysis into the Spatial Distribution of Trauma Incidents and Ambulance Functionalities in Karachi, Journal of Space Technology , Volume 7, Issue 1.
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