Simulation-based Analysis of Co-dispatching in Prehospital Stroke Care

A mobile stroke unit (MSU) is a specialized ambulance, enabling to shorten the time to diagnosis and treatment for stroke patients. In the current paper, we present a simulation-based approach to study the potential impacts of collaborative use of regular ambulances and MSUs in prehospital transportation for stroke patients, denoted as co-dispatching. We integrated a co-dispatch policy in an existing modeling framework for constructing emergency medical services simulation models. In a case study, we applied the extended framework to southern Sweden to evaluate the effectiveness of using the co-dispatch policy for different types of stroke. The results indicate reduced time to diagnosis and treatment for stroke patients when using the co-dispatch policy compared to the situation where either a regular ambulance or an MSU is assigned for a stroke incident.