Abstract
KEY WORDS:
Operation Research, Queuing Theory, Statistics, Emergency Aid.
ABSTRACT
The article deals with the organization and performance of the transport – medical teams in the emergency aid system. It describes the stages in the investigation process of the service system. The investigation itself is aimed at finding out characteristics which can give a better idea of how system works, and, following that, to give some suggestions of improving its performance. The article gives a methodological account of how the data was collected and processed. It describes the stages of statistical observation, statistical grouping and statistical analysis. The article dwells upon the investigation of the incoming calls flow, the time intervals between two consecutive calls and the time consumed to deliver the service. It examines the principles of the programme used to carry out the statistical investigation and describes the programme for statistical data analysis.The Emergency Aid system receives night and day incoming calls from patients who need immediate attendance. It, however, has limited capacity to respond to all service requests. This results in queues of waiting patients. The description of the ongoing flow processes involves adequate mathematical apparatus. The main goal of this description is to determine - as accurately as it is needed for practical purposes – the quantitative dependence between the number of medical teams on duty and the characteristics of the calls flow on the one hand, and the quality of the service supplied on the other hand. Provided this goal is achieved, it would be possible to point out the system’s shortcomings and to find out how they affect its efficiency, as well as to improve its performance; it would also be possible to make some suggestions for the way the system is structured, so as to meet all the performance requirements (4). To make relevant suggestions for an efficient system organization it is necessary to investigate the stochastic process which goes on within the system and to describe it adopting mathematical methods. These problems are dealt with by the queuing theory which was developed with T. Saaty’s considerable contribution (9). The completion of the task investigating the emergency aid system as a queuing system can be divided in three main stages (7):