JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Emergency Medical Services provide a pivotal role in giving timely and appropriate responses to emergency events caused by medical, natural, or human-caused disasters. To provide adequate resources for the emergency services such as ambulances, it is necessary to understand the demand for such services. In Indonesia, estimates of demand for emergency services cannot be obtained easily due to a lack of published literature or official reports concerning the matter.

Objective:

To ascertain an estimate of the annual volume of hospital emergency visits and the corresponding demand for ambulance services in the city of Jakarta.

Methods:

In this study, we addressed the problem of emergency services demand estimation when aggregated detailed data is not available or not part of routine data collection. We used survey data together with the local Office of National Statistics reports and sample data from hospital EDs to establish parameter estimation. This involved estimating four parameters: the population of each area per period (day and night), the annual per capita hospital emergency visits, the probability of an emergency taking place in each period, and the rate of ambulance need per area. Monte Carlo simulation and naïve methods were used to generate an estimation for the mean ambulance needs per area in Jakarta.

Results:

The results estimated the total annual ambulance need in Jakarta is between 83 to 241 thousand. Assuming the rate of ambulance utilization in Jakarta at 9.3%, we estimated the total annual hospital emergency visits in Jakarta at around 0.9 and 2.6 million. The study also found that the estimation from using the simulation method was smaller than the average (naïve) methods (P < .001).

Conclusions:

The results provide an estimation of the annual emergency services needed for the city of Jakarta. In the absence of aggregated routinely collected data on EMS utilization in Jakarta, our results provide insights into whether the current emergency services such as ambulances have been adequately provided.