Dr Jessica Devlin-Hegedus1
1NSW Ambulance, Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Dr Jess Devlin-Hegedus is an anaesthetist and works for NSW Ambulance as a State Retrieval Consultant in Aeromedical Control and clinically as a Prehospital and Retrieval Specialist. As a member of the ANZCA Environmental Sustainability Working Group, she is interested in environmental sustainability in anaesthesia and prehospital care & education.
Abstract:
Aeromedical operations are likely to contribute significantly to the overall environmental impact of ambulance services, particularly due to emissions associated with aviation fuel usage. There are no immediately available alternative aviation fuel options for our existing fleet or options that would utilise alternative energy sources, with less environmental impact. We propose that it is essential that we seek to use our existing fleet of assets most efficiently to reduce the amount of aviation fuel burned, which will have both cost and environmental benefits for aeromedical services. Therefore, NSW Ambulance will investigate the use of decision support tools to guide the utilisation of aeromedical assets in the Aeromedical Control Centre. Our primary aim is to investigate whether a decision support tool, that considers relevant variables such as tasking priority, distance, origin/destination logistics and availability will allow us to select the most efficient asset, whilst ensuring that we do not compromise clinical care.
Our prospective research will utilise the aeromedical tasking software ‘Rapid’ to provide real time decision support to aeromedical tasking. The software will be used to generate a recommendation for the most efficient, available asset for each tasking based on clinical priority and allow audit against the actual asset selected. This will occur via a shadow tasking process, which will utilise incoming tasking and asset availability information and record de-identified data for each case. We will then calculate cost and environmental savings over the selected time period, associated with the use of the decision support software.
Data collection in process.