Today, EMS organisations face an overwhelming array of operational challenges, ranging from staff shortages and employee burnout to budget cuts and difficulties justifying additional funding. Across Europe and around the world, EMS providers are being asked to do more with less, with predictable results for patient safety and employee well-being. However, many progressive organisations are finding ways to overcome these challenges with innovative digital solutions.
Here, we examine the key challenges contemporary EMS providers face, before exploring how the Omda Readiness digital EMS solution mitigates many of these issues. We will also provide real-world examples of the solution in action to demonstrate successful emergency preparedness and response use cases.
Key challenges for emergency preparedness and response
We have identified three core areas and challenges where EMS solutions can help providers improve performance and service delivery.
1. Budget cuts impacting service delivery
Most developed healthcare systems face issues surrounding financial restrictions and budgetary cuts. While some of these financial limitations are ideological in nature, healthcare systems have also had to compete with a significant number of external factors. Post-COVID recovery has been hampered by inflation caused by, among other things, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while long-term factors, such as ageing populations and climate change, further compound the difficulties (HPW).
Though most healthcare systems see a year-on-year increase in funding (both nominally and in real terms), the pressures they face are also growing. A real-term increase in annual funding can also fail to meet operational requirements, resulting in a funding shortfall. If this occurs in consecutive years, the strain on health services can be enormous. In the UK, the BMA calculates that starting in 2010, consecutive years of below-average funding increases resulted in a cumulative underspend of £362 billion (BMA).
This clearly has a considerable impact on performance and organisations’ ability to deliver high-quality healthcare services. It also stretches existing healthcare resources, including medical professionals, to breaking point.
2. Staffing, turnover and employee well-being
Healthcare budget cuts directly impact staff welfare, as employees are asked to do more, work harder and take on more responsibility. Over a protracted period, these demands result in greater emotional and physical stress, mental health issues, burnout and high staff turnover, all of which influence the quality of care provision and level of emergency preparedness.
Stress and burnout rates among healthcare workers are typically higher than in other professions, regardless of the country in which they work. Approximately one in four Swedish nurses and physicians display moderate to severe burnout symptoms (JoAD). In the UK, that figure rises to a third of all healthcare professionals (SOM). This has a real and measurable impact, with experts suggesting that NHS England saw an absence rate of 5.6% in 2022, much of which was attributed to burnout. This equated to losing nearly 75,000 staff to illness and 170,000 staff that have either left or are planning to leave (SOM).
Burnout, mental health and staff dissatisfaction leads to increased staff turnover and a shortfall in healthcare professionals. Many long-term healthcare strategies propose training large numbers of new healthcare professionals to relieve the strain on existing employees. However, this policy takes time to implement, often requires the input of the same overburdened staff, and will not have the desired effect if high turnover remains a concern.
3. Patient safety
The combination of budget cuts, high staff turnover and employee burnout inevitably impacts patient safety and service quality. In many instances, issues in one area of healthcare have a knock-on effect, impacting service provision elsewhere. The emergency sector is an excellent example. Delays, staffing shortages and capacity issues at UK hospital A&E departments mean ambulances cannot hand over patients and regularly have to spend hours waiting outside, unable to attend to other incidents. In some cases, ambulance crews spend an entire shift waiting to hand over a single patient (WO). Doctors and paramedics have warned of the potential consequences of such wait times, arguing they have a dangerous impact on patient safety (BBC).
Concerns over patient safety, the issue of real-term budget cuts and the danger of overstretched healthcare workforces are all connected issues that impact one another. Consequently, any solution that seeks to improve emergency service performance must consider and tackle all three challenges.
How digital technologies enhance emergency preparedness and response
Highly specialised, well-designed digital solutions enable EMS organisations to overcome these challenges in several ways. Here, we demonstrate how they achieve this using Omda Readiness – an advanced digital platform that contains three core products.
Omda Readiness-Predict is the world’s most advanced Fire & EMS simulation solution, enabling EMS organisations to model ‘What If?’ scenarios and facilitating evidence-based resource optimisation.
Omda Readiness-Live provides unparalleled dispatch support for emergency services, providing a holistic view of the emergency environment during an incident and streamlining dispatch decisions.
Omda Readiness-Playback enables EMS organisations to revisit historical incidents and analyse every aspect of the emergency incident response. These learnings can then be applied to future incidents and used to shape operational policy and response best practices.
Omda Readiness enhances EMS performance and helps organisations overcome challenges in the following ways.
Evidence-based funding arrangements
Omda Readiness plays a crucial role in creating a data-driven, evidence-based argument to demonstrate the impact of budget cuts in terms of emergency service responsiveness, patient safety and staff morale. In cases where Omda Readiness is not used, funding arrangements typically involve negotiating a package with commissioners based on anecdotal insight and historical precedent. The lack of robust evidence makes it difficult to establish a scientific causal link between funding decisions and operational outcomes.
Part of the Omda Readiness product portfolio, Predict is an advanced emergency preparedness modelling and simulation tool that enables EMS organisations to model ‘What If?’ scenarios and understand the effect of specific operational adjustments. Several Predict customers now leverage these advanced modelling capabilities to draft well-supported, data-driven business cases that protect against budget cuts, defend existing financial arrangements and, in some cases, justify increases in budget allocations.
To demonstrate the power of Predict in this context, we recently conducted a case study with Hato Hone St John, which supplies emergency response healthcare services to approximately 90% of New Zealand’s population. It works closely with service commissioners and uses Predict to model several scenarios based on various performance targets, operational variables and funding requirements. It then presents these options and the commissioners approve one. This transparent, evidence-based and collaborative approach has proven hugely successful.
Read more about Hato Hone St John’s use of Omda Readiness.
Improving staff well-being
Predict enables emergency services organisations to model operational policies and adjustments that affect employee well-being. For instance, one problem seen by ambulance services is what we call shift ‘overruns’, where a crew responds to a call near the end of their shift and then must extend their shift to complete the call. Besides requiring a tired crew to work extra time, overruns can cause knock-on effects where crews share vehicles or have mandatory rest time between shifts.
By simulating different end-of-shift restrictions in terms of incident types and locations it is possible to understand the resultant overruns and the impact on performance; restricting a shift will reduce overruns but might also reduce the number of calls dealt with per shift. The same modelling techniques can be applied to meal break policies and other operational decisions that have a significant impact on morale.
The true power of the Predict solution is that it enables EMS organisations to balance staff well-being and morale with operational targets and requirements. In the case of ambulance shift overruns, experimenting with untested or unsimulated end-of-shift policies could have disastrous real-world consequences for patients. This makes it far more difficult to make operational changes that positively impact staff well-being. Predict gives decision-makers insight into these consequences in a safe simulated environment, allowing them to implement changes with more confidence and a data-driven justification.
Read more about Predict and staff welfare in the WAST case study.
Connecting operational policy to service delivery
Emergency incidents are often highly complex, with diverse assets in play and a remarkable number of variables influencing the outcome. Omda Readiness emergency preparedness software provides EMS organisations with a comprehensive overview of the entire incident response ecosystem, facilitating in-depth analysis that enables decision-makers to extract valuable learnings.
Playback acts as a standalone solution or add-on module for Omda Readiness users. It enables decision-makers to review and analyse historical incidents, running through the entire response, from initial call receipt to final handover. The ability to see, in fully customisable detail, where all vehicles and incidents were at any time and determine the causality of events enables you to establish a single version of the truth and a coherent account of the response.
Couple this with Predict’s advanced modelling capabilities, which enable you to model changes in incident response policies and best practices, and you have a digital platform that helps unravel complex incidents and directly connect operational policy to service outcomes. By eliminating the guesswork, Omda Readiness empowers decision-makers to make proactive changes that have a real impact on service delivery.
Resource optimisation
As budgets are stretched and EMS organisations are asked to do more with less, decision-makers must extract as much value as possible from emergency assets. Resource optimisation is imperative, and this is exactly what Predict is designed for. From decisions concerning where to locate new ambulance bases to how to organise shifts and where to station on-call vehicles, Predict provides EMS organisations with unprecedented insight into resource allocation, ensuring they extract maximum value from those resources and providing data-driven justifications for decisions.
At the same time, Predict enables service providers to decrease costs by safely reducing vehicle mileage, eliminating wasteful resource use and reducing shift overruns and the ensuing overtime costs.
Employee support, training and education
Fast and consistent dispatch is a skill that can take significant time to master and requires comprehensive support and training. From a dispatch support perspective, the Live solution reduces dispatchers’ mental load and enhances the speed and consistency of their dispatch and deployment decisions. Along with a comprehensive real-time overview of the emergency environment, Live gives dispatchers proactive positioning recommendations for available vehicles to ensure maximum compliance with post plans. If desired, these deployments can be automated, minimising the time required to direct vehicles to the optimal positions.
Historically, advanced emergency preparedness training tools were not widely available. Playback changes that by providing new employees with a means of running through previous emergency incidents, understanding exactly how they played out, and where processes could be improved. This enables employees to gain experience in a diverse range of incidents and acquire skills without the pressure of a real-time incident.
A comprehensive audit trail
All EMS organisations benefit from digital technology that creates a comprehensive audit trail for each and every incident they respond to. While this audit trail is useful for the training and education purposes detailed above, it also ensures EMS providers are better prepared for litigation or performance enquiries. As demand for EMS services and utilisation rates increase, so does the potential for incidents that result in litigation. This can be stressful for individuals, consume valuable organisational resources and prove extremely costly.
The Live and Playback solutions enable EMS organisations to retrieve archived recordings of any incident, providing an end-to-end account of what decisions were made and how individuals and the organisation responded. This streamlines incident investigations, eliminates doubts about event causality by creating a single version of the truth, and reduces stress for managers and frontline workers.
Improved emergency preparedness and response with Omda solutions
At Omda, we believe digital emergency preparedness and response solutions have a critical role to play in helping EMS providers overcome their most pressing operational challenges. From maximising the value of resources with advanced simulation software to extracting insightful learnings from historical incidents with response playback, Omda digital solutions can improve EMS decision-making, reduce costs and enhance patient safety.
To learn more about how Omda can help your organisation improve its emergency preparedness and response planning, head to our Omda Readiness solution page.
