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From flooding to finance: NHS ambulance‐assisted evacuations of care home residents in Norfolk and Suffolk, UK

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posted on 2020-01-28, 09:36 authored by Sarah Johnson, Dapeng YuDapeng Yu
Focusing on the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk (UK), this investigation examines the effect of coastal and fluvial flooding on the use of ambulance service vehicles in the assisted evacuation of care home residents and quantifies the cost of this service to the NHS under flood conditions. This was completed using GIS Network Analyst functions to identify the impacts of flood probability (high: 1 in 30, medium: 1 in 30 to 1 in 100, and low: 1 in 100 to 1 in 1000) and target ambulance response-times (7, 18, 120, and 180 min) on ambulance service area, road network accessibility, the number of vulnerable care homes and their accessibility, the appropriateness of pre-identified evacuation routes, and the drive-time based evacuation cost to the National Health Service (NHS). The results indicate that approximately 68 care homes and 2,320 residents in Norfolk and Suffolk are at risk of inundation, and care home accessibility, in addition to ambulance service area, decreases with shorter ambulance response-times and lower flood probabilities. Additionally, the use of pre-identified evacuation routes, by the ambulance service, promotes efficient navigation between ambulance stations, care homes, and rest centres, but can unfavourably cause network clustering if unmanaged. In association with these routes, an estimated cost of evacuation based on ambulance drivetime was calculated at £34,000–£42,000 depending on flood probability. The importance of this research is highlighted by the current lack of identified flood evacuation and accessibility maps for emergency responder use, and the associated lack of evacuation cost estimations to be used by the government and NHS to budget for aid assistance during these natural disasters. Therefore, the application of this approach at a national level in the flood emergency planning process would be beneficial to promote strategic efficiency and financial preparedness of ambulance services for the purpose of ambulance-assisted flood evacuations.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

Journal of Flood Risk Management

Volume

13

Issue

1

Publisher

Wiley

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Wiley under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Acceptance date

2019-12-17

Publication date

2020-01-09

Copyright date

2020

ISSN

1753-318X

eISSN

1753-318X

Language

  • en

Depositor

Miss Sarah Johnson. Deposit date: 27 January 2020

Article number

e12592

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