A public access defibrillation trial in urban and rural communities in Northern Ireland: developing the roster model

This paper introduces a special computer-based roster scheme developed to allocate and manage volunteers working as part of a public access defibrillation trial. The roster scheme, developed for the urban region, is rooted on population statistics and demographics for that area and utilizes geographical mapping software and spatial modelling techniques to subdivide the geographical location into appropriate paging zones. The central location for zones was constrained to be within a reasonable travelling time for each volunteer. By estimating sudden cardiac arrest occurrences using a Poisson process, the model, together with road network information, selects a roster which minimizes volunteer response time.