Study I — Dispatcher work under scarcity (qualitative)
Study I examines dispatch as real-time safety management: prioritisation, coordination, and re-prioritisation across competing calls when demand exceeds
available units.
Aim
To describe how emergency medical dispatchers reason, prioritise, and coordinate EMS resource allocation during emergency calls under operational constraints.
Design
- Method: qualitative interviews and inductive qualitative content analysis.
- Focus: decision-making under uncertainty, queue management, and trade-offs.
Key contributions (study-level)
- Frames dispatch as a form of coordinated command-and-control under scarcity rather than single-call decision-making.
- Makes the dispatch queue and re-prioritisation dynamics visible as safety-relevant objects.
- Clarifies how moral responsibility and operational constraints co-exist in dispatcher reasoning.
Implications for Dynamic EMS Allocation
The findings motivate allocation approaches that treat “the queue” and its time dynamics as first-class safety objects—supporting transparency in
who waits, for how long, and under what conditions.
Status / availability
Manuscript. Public link will be added when shareable.
Adaptive EMS Allocation 