Simulation tools for the Assessment of Emergency Management Processes
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| Status | Open |
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Large scale disasters represent a major challenge for any medical service. Typically such disasters, be they founded in terrorism, natural or technical catastrophize, generate a significant number of casualties (MASCAL – Mass Casualty) with severe and unusual injury patterns. Many processes are supported by Standard Operating Procedures as common practice, but any catastrophe requires a change of processes due to the nature of the disaster and thus furnishes a major challenge for hospital operations. As of now, hospitals and medical services are designed for a specific workload that has been agreed among different stakeholders. Hence, processes and their resources are designed in light of best practices for patient care as well as anticipated workload.
Large scale disasters represent a major challenge for any medical service. Typically such disasters, be they founded in terrorism, natural or technical catastrophize, generate a significant number of casualties (MASCAL – Mass Casualty) with severe and unusual injury patterns. Many processes are supported by Standard Operating Procedures as common practice, but any catastrophe requires a change of processes due to the nature of the disaster and thus furnishes a major challenge for hospital operations. As of now, hospitals and medical services are designed for a specific workload that has been agreed among different stakeholders. Hence, processes and their resources are designed in light of best practices for patient care as well as anticipated workload.
The picture changes significantly, once major disasters, e.g. terrorist attacks, happen. In such uncommon situations, the workload and injury patterns change tremendously and require a modification of the established treatment and organisational processes. Moreover, treatment capabilities required might also change significantly if for instance many patients arrive with gunshot wounds. The question arises
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how to switch from standard processes to „MASCAL mode";
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how to estimate maximal capacities of the individual hospital for patient care given a MASCAL situation, i.e. how many patients can be treated compare to regular operations.
By law hospitals have to define emergency plans to prepare for MASCAL situations. Robustness of such emergency plans comes as challenge for process assessment. The purpose of this thesis is to implement a multi agent-based simulation environment for the assessment of emergency processes. Each agent represents a processing station with certain capabilities and capacities, e.g., a radiology department with different services. Process models for the emergency processes are available with some capacity information. Prime objective of the environment is the simulation of this emergency processes in order to identify bottlenecks or backlogs piling-up.
Fraunhofer FIT
Prof. Dr. Thomas Rose & Thomas Osterland
Klinik für Unfallchirurgie, Orthopädie und Sporttraumatologie Köln-Merheim
Lehrstuhl der Universität Witten/ Herdecke
Dr. Thorsten Tjardes & Dr. Sebastian Imach
TjardesT@kliniken-koeln.de & ImachSe@kliniken-koeln.de
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