A Field Study of Emergency Ambulance Dispatching: Implications for Decision Support

Abstract

To inform the design of computer-based support for decision making, a field study was conducted in a communication centre for emergency medical services (EMS). 142 hours of direct observations, spanning 13 different shifts were conducted. EMS is an intentional work domain that emphasizes human-human interaction over human-machine interaction. This study focused on the information requirements for EMS dispatching, the collaboration between EMS personnel within and beyond the communication centre, and the information that is currently available to the dispatchers. An abstraction-decomposition space (Rasmussen, 1985; Vicente, 1999) was used to model the information requirements in this work domain, and to identify opportunities for enhancing and/or redesigning the decision support.

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