Adaptive EMS Allocation
Crafting the patient safety net in prehospital emergency care through research on dispatch prioritisation, response-time variability, scarce response capacity, and system resilience.
A safety net is not a response-time target.
Emergency medical services protect patients by interpreting uncertainty, preserving readiness, and allocating finite response capacity across competing needs.
Who receives help first, who can safely wait, and how does the system protect patients while certainty is still unavailable?
From speed to system behaviour
Response time remains important, but it is not a complete description of patient safety. Delays are produced by dispatch, triage, workload, geography, availability, call handling, and travel.
From triage to adaptive allocation
The research frames EMS allocation as adaptive system work: reassessment, queue governance, geographic coverage, and operational judgement under scarcity.
Adaptive emergency medical services allocation
Crafting the patient safety net in prehospital emergency care. Doctoral thesis, Karolinska Institutet, 2026.
Thesis contribution
The thesis examines prehospital patient safety through the EMS safety net: dispatch, triage, response-time management, queue governance, and allocation decisions that distribute delay exposure and safety margins across patients and time.
The thesis does not support automation claims or direct deployment of data-driven models. Operational translation requires prospective evaluation, governance, human-factors design, and safeguards.
Study I published in BMJ Open
Stewarding scarce response capacity examines how emergency medical dispatchers prioritise patients and manage ambulance resources when system capacity is constrained.
Four studies. One systems question.
Together, the studies examine how uncertainty, patient vulnerability, and operational delay mechanisms interact in prehospital emergency care.
Stewarding scarce response capacity
Emergency medical dispatchers describe prioritisation under scarcity as stewardship of a safety-critical dispatch queue, balancing patient acuity, queue governance, geographic coverage, and system readiness.
Open study pageBreathing emergencies and nonlinear risk
Response time, age, and sex are examined in relation to high-risk time-sensitive conditions among breathing-problem missions.
Open study pageInfectious presentations and concordance
Dispatch suspicion, on-scene phenotype, and time-sensitive triage are mapped in fever/infection assignments.
Open study pageResponse-time variability
Response time is modelled as an emergent systems metric shaped by workload, priority, weather, geography, and operational intervals.
Open study pageEvidence for governing uncertainty
The site is a research portfolio for EMS leaders, public-sector healthcare analysts, academic collaborators, and stakeholders interested in patient safety, dispatch, triage, and adaptive allocation.
