Dr Emily Moylan | Optimising ambulance logistics for time-critical emergencies

Seminar overview

Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is a leading cause of mortality in otherwise healthy adults. Survival from OHCA has improved only modestly over time and declines exponentially with duration of arrest, falling to less than 2% at one hour.

This talk presents  a transport and logistics modelling framework to evaluate competing emergency medical service (EMS) delivery strategies for OHCA. Motivated by emerging interventions such as pre-hospital extracorporeal membrane oxygenation cardiopulmonary resuscitation (ECMO-CPR) and drone-delivered automated external defibrillators (AEDs), the framework combines network analysis, travel-time estimation, facility-location modelling and survival functions to quantify achievable response performance. The methodologies are applied in Australian contexts, enabling a consistent assessment of how differences in geography, population distribution, transport networks and hospital locations influence system effectiveness.

This is translational research in partnership with ambulance services and clinicians. The resulting analytical structure offers a generalisable basis for designing and comparing next-generation EMS logistics and demonstrates the utility of transport-engineering approaches for improving access to time-critical medical interventions.

About the speaker

Emily Moylan is a Senior Lecturer in Transport at the School of Civil Engineering, University of Sydney, where she is leading a research program on how transport system performance varies across people, places and time.  Emily’s research builds on data from many sources including connected vehicle logs, pedestrian trajectories, GTFS, and transit smartcards to understand the complexity and variability in the way that people access work, education, healthcare and social opportunities. Her work has translational impact through partnerships with Transport Canberra and City Services, Transport for New South Wales, NSW Health, NSW Dept of Planning and Environment, and the Australian Office for Road Safety.

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