Optimal Dispatch of Volunteers to Out-of-hospital Cardiac Arrest Patients

Abstract

Initiatives with mobile phone dispatched volunteers to out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) cases, can be found today in some countries, e.g. Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy. When an OHCA case is reported, an alarm is sent to the registered volunteers’ phones. However, the allocation of which volunteers to send to the automatic external defibrillator (AED) and who to send directly to the patient, is today based on simple rules of thumb. In this paper, we propose a model to optimally select how many and which volunteers to send directly to the patient, and who should pick up and deliver an AED. The results show that the model can help increase the survivability of the patients, compared to simple decision rules.