Hazard Analysis and Vehicle Safety Issues for Emergency Medical Service Vehicles: Where is the State of the Art?

Emergency Medical Service (EMS) vehicles, ambulances, are relatively familiar vehicles to those of us in the general community. We see them as ‘life savers’ racing through the streets to provide emergency medical care to the public. However, what are the safety issues that pertain to this important public service and public safety industry? What do we know of the risks and hazards, how can we measure these and how can we optimize the safety of this system? This paper provides an outline of the known hazards, some tools that can be applied to evaluating these safety issues, some of the current safety challenges and addresses some of the multidisciplinary techniques for optimizing the safety of the system as a whole.