Community first response for cardiac arrest: comparing phased dispatch policies through Monte Carlo simulation

Background Advanced Community First Responder (CFR) systems send so-called phased alerts: notifications with built-in time delays. The policy that defines these delays affects response times, CFR workload and the number of redundant CFR arrivals.

We compare policies by Monte Carlo Simulation, estimating the three metrics above. We bootstrap acceptance probabilities and response delays from 29,307 rows of historical data covering all GoodSAM alerts in New Zealand between 1-12-2017 and 30-11-2020. We simulate distances between the patient and CFRs by assuming that CFRs are located uniformly at random in a 1 km circle around the patient, for different CFR densities. Our simulated CFRs travel with a distance-dependent speed that was estimated by linear regression on observed speeds among those responders in the abovementioned data set that eventually reached the patient.

The alerting policy has a large impact on the expected number of alerts sent, the redundant arrivals and the probability of patient survival. CFR app managers can use our results to identify a policy that displays a desirable trade-off between these performance measures. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Funding Statement Pieter L. van den Berg reports financial support was provided by Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Utrecht and by TKI Dinalog. Caroline J. Jagtenberg reports financial support was provided by TKI Dinalog. Shane G. Henderson reports financial support was provided by National Science Foundation. Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Not Applicable The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below: Not applicable I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals. Not Applicable I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Not Applicable I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines, such as any relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material, if applicable. Not Applicable Data Availability Data subject to third party restrictions. Data available from the authors with the permission of St John New Zealand