Abstract
Introduction
Drone-delivered automated external defibrillators (AEDs) may reduce delays to defibrillation
for out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCAs). We sought to determine how integration
of drones and selection of drone bases between emergency service stations (i.e., paramedic,
fire, police) would affect 9-1-1 call-to-arrival intervals.
Methods
We identified all treated OHCAs in southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada
from Jan. 2014 to Dec. 2020. We developed mathematical models to select 1–5 optimal
drone base locations from each of: paramedic stations, fire stations, police stations,
or an unrestricted grid-based set of points to minimize drone travel time to OHCAs.
We evaluated models on the estimated first response interval assuming that drones
were integrated with existing OHCA response. We compared median response intervals
with historical response, as well as across drone base locations.
Results
A total of 1610 OHCAs were included in the study with a historical median response
interval of 6.4 minutes (IQR 5.0–8.6). All drone-integrated response systems significantly
reduced the median response interval to 4.2–5.4 minutes (all P < 0.001), with grid-based
stations using 5 drones resulting in the lowest response interval (4.2 minutes). Median
response times between drone base location types differed by 6–16 seconds, all comparisons
of which were statistically significant (all P < 0.02).
Conclusion
Integrating drone-delivered AEDs into OHCA response may reduce first response intervals,
even with a small quantity of drones. Implementing drone response with only one emergency
service resulted in similar response metrics regardless of the emergency service hosting
the drone base and was competitive with unrestricted drone base locations.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: March 17, 2022
Accepted:
March 13,
2022
Received in revised form:
March 8,
2022
Received:
February 7,
2022
Identification
Copyright
© 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
