In some emergency medical systems the service demand is high due to the treatment of patients in the range severe to mild. In these systems, may be queues formation and so the need to explicitly consider priority in care is extremely important. In this study we extend the hypercube model to explicitly consider priority queue. In order to verify the feasibility and applicability of this approach, we conducted a case study at Ribeirão Preto´s SAMU (SAMU-RP). We analyzed two alternative scenarios to examine two important issues: the impact of the removals and the effect of increased demand in the different classes of calls of the system. The focus is on the average response time to users, considered as an important performance measure of the system, especially for the high priority calls. The results show that the approach can be successfully used to analyze systems with priority queue.
Hypercube queuing model; Priority queue; SAMU; Emergency medical system
