Improve capacity of an emergency medical service Mexican institution

The measure of ambulance cycle time is of particular interest in the performance of Emergency Medical Systems (EMS). Its value determines the ambulance responsiveness level of the operations system of an EMS institution. For a given number of ambulances in operation, as the value of the average ambulance responsiveness increases, total ambulance capacity for the system is increased. Additional impacts resulting from this situation are; an improvement on the average ambulance response time and patient´s health risk due to a greater availability of ambulances; and a lower need of ambulance replacement investment requirements and operating cost. This work suggests an improvement approach based on waste elimination and Theory of Constraints for reducing ambulance cycle time. The approach is applied to a Mexican EMS institution based on metropolitan Monterrey. Results of the application are provided.