In rural areas, services to support daily life are generally short and a large disparity exists from place to place. This study proposes an index to measure the level of emergency medical service, a minimum service to support daily life, at given locations. The required characteristics of the level of service index are firstly discussed, and then an accessibility type index is proposed with holding the characteristics pointed out in the discussion. By using this index, we develop a systematic method to find the sub-system of that improvement that contributes the most to raising the level of service. This method gives us the order of improvement over sub-systems under the restrictions of budget, time, and other resources. The usefulness of the methodology is examined through a case study. (Author/publisher).
Abstract