Help us to Help: Improving Non-urgent Transport on a Portuguese Fire Station

In Portugal, the transport of non-urgent patients is mostly performed by fire stations. These non-profit organizations have tight budgets and cannot afford to buy expensive software to improve their services. Furthermore, it is not always easy to find open-source tools. In this research, an open-source solver, developed in Visual Basic for Applications, was used and adapted as a case study to analyze the case of a fire station in the North of Portugal. The modifications to the solver are presented and real instances are tested. An analysis of the environmental impacts that originated during transportation is presented, summarizing the main implications caused by this activity. The results show better use of the ambulances’ capacity and significant reductions in the traveled distances and in the fire station’s ecological footprint.