Simulation of single start station for Edmonton emergency medical services

The City of Edmonton's Emergency Medical Services (EMS) department proposed to move to a ‘single start station system’ (SS system) in which all ambulances would begin and end their shifts at the same location. We developed a discrete event simulation model to estimate the impact of this change and subsequently used this model to explore other changes to Edmonton EMS operations, including the addition of stations, the addition of ambulances, different shifts, and a different redeployment system. We found that an SS system increased average unit availability and the fraction of calls reached within the department's response time standard, particularly during the current shift changeover periods. The paper describes the development and validation of the simulation model and summarizes the results of its application.