Brian Overbeek: Ahead of ambulance: Optimizing volunteer training 13 March 2025 16:00 - 17:00

To decrease emergency response times, traditional emergency response is increasingly extended by community first responder (CFR) systems that dispatch medically trained volunteers to nearby incidents. Even though most CFR systems dispatch volunteers only to out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, volunteers can be trained to provide medical assistance for various emergency types. CFR systems that dispatch volunteers to multiple emergency types can subsequently increase the effectiveness of the system by providing trainings to its volunteers as this enables them to be dispatched to more emergency types. However, many CFR systems rely upon financial support from local communities, making it financially infeasible to provide all trainings to all volunteers. In this presentation, we introduce an optimization model to determine how to train volunteers to maximize the effectiveness of the CFR system given a certain budget, where the effectiveness of the CFR system is measured by the probability that at least one volunteer arrives before the ambulance.  As volunteers are highly heterogeneous in their availability and location, we explicitly capture this in the optimization model. We present a solution approach that efficiently obtains optimal solutions for realistically sized instances. We apply the introduced optimization approach to a CFR system operating in Lincolnshire, United Kingdom. Results from this case study and corresponding insights obtained will be presented.