Spatial accessibility of emergency medical services under inclement weather: a case study in Beijing, China

Abstract

The accessibility of emergency medical services (EMSs) is not only determined by the distribution of emergency medical facilities but is also influenced by weather conditions. Inclement weather could affect the efficiency of the city's traffic network and further affect the response time of EMSs, which could therefore be an essential impact factor on the safety of human lives. This study proposes an EMSs-accessibility quantification method based on selected indicators, explores the influence of inclement weather on EMSs accessibility, and identifies the hotspots that have difficulty accessing timely EMSs. A case study was implemented in Beijing, which is a typical megacity in China, based on the ground-truth traffic data of the whole city in 2019. The results show that inclement weather has a general negative impact on EMSs accessibility. Under an inclement weather scenario, the area in the city that could get EMSs within 15 min would decrease by 13 % compared with a normal scenario (the average state of weekdays without precipitation), while in some suburban townships, the population that could get 15 min EMSs would decrease by 40 %. We found that snowfall has a greater impact on the accessibility of EMSs than rainfall. Although on the whole, the urban area would have more traffic speed reduction, towns in suburban areas with lower baseline EMSs accessibility are more vulnerable to inclement weather. Under the worst scenario in 2019, 12.6 % of the population (about 3.5 million people) could not get EMSs within 15 min, compared with 7.5 % with normal weather conditions. This study could provide a scientific reference for city planning departments to optimize traffic under inclement weather and the site selection of emergency medical facilities.