Location Planning for Constructing New Emergency Medical Services: A Case Study Publisher



Mostafaeipour A ; Ebrahimian M ; Sedaghat A ; Jahangiri M ; Mostafaeipour N ; Mostafaeipour N ; Bolourizadeh E
Source: Journal of Engineering (United Kingdom) Published:2026

Abstract

Emergency medical services (EMSs) are an efficient and effective system created to provide pre-hospital care so as to minimize physical harm in the event of an emergency like Corona pandemic. The system is aimed at providing a rapid response to save patients’ lives and, if necessary, to transfer them to pandemic treatment centers. The location of EMS bases plays a very important role in achieving this goal. Also, in view of the need to check on the overall physical condition of patients, accessibility to EMS can increase survival chance of patients who are seriously and critically ill. In this study, 15 urban regions in city of Isfahan, Iran, are ranked for the construction of new emergency bases. The objectives are to prioritize the regions with the highest accessibility demands so that optimal emergency services will be available to the people in immediate need. The criteria used in this study are based on previous studies, and the opinions of experts in medical emergencies and university professors. These criteria are traffic, vulnerability to earthquakes, erosion rate of texture, literacy level, price of land, number of hospitals, severity of accidents, number of missions, average time to reach accident sites, and population per emergency. The Vlsekriterijumska Optimizacija I KOmpromisno Resenje (VIKOR) approach was used to rank the regions and fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) to determine the weight of the criteria, while the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) and analytic network process (ANP) methods were used to validate the results. Given that the results of the multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques were different in some regions, the mean ranks and Borda were used to reach a general consensus for the ranking of the regions. According to the results that were obtained, several regions are identified as the regions with the highest priority for the construction of new EMS bases. The criteria with the highest FAHP-derived weights are found to be time and traffic conditions. The methodology developed here is extendable to different locations worldwide. Copyright © 2026 Ali Mostafaeipour et al. Journal of Engineering published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.