Illustrative questions

An example of illustrative questions for prescriptive analysis are shown below. These analyses, if used, are not meant as standalone but as an augmented aid to decision-making alongside subject-matter expertise, existing operational models and existing evidence-based interventions.

These questions are also more focussed on operational performance. While inter-related, they would need considering alongside other dimensions such as staff welbeing, patient clinical outcomes, demographic variation and wider system performance.

What-if and sensitivity | What happens to response times and vehicle availability when:
- Vehicle on-duty hours increase
- Supply schedule is changed
- Demand increases
- Demand by category varies
- Hear-and-treat rate is changed
- Rate of conveyance is changed
- Conveyance to ED (rather than elsewhere) is changed
- Specific job cycle time component times decrease
- “ED pressure” changes (via ED ‘resource nr’ or ‘time in department’ parameters)
- One or more of the parameters above is changed to be equal to another benchmark organisation?
- One of the parameters above is changed to be equal to pre-pandemic levels or historic growth
- All parameters resemble pre-pandemic levels or historic growth, apart from one
Goal-seek | What type of change to one of the levels above delivers a given level of availability (or other KPI) improvement)
Return | Under which (e.g. varying levels of A&E pressure) conditions do the levers/interventions above provide diminishing returns or lower effectiveness.
Dynamics | What happens to response times, availability and the use of escalations (compared to a ‘no escalation’ pressure scenario) when these dynamic escalations are allowed to occur:
- Patients are allowed to balk to a certain extent
- Patients are allowed to renege to a certain extent
- Conveyance rates are sensitive to pressure