Analysing dispatch decision making in high-complexity environments: The P.A.T.H.S. framework
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Background
Decision-making in emergency services involving the allocation of scarce resources is a key challenge for large, complex organisations required to prioritise demand against multiple, often competing criteria. Emergency Medical Dispatch is a case in point, where Enhanced and Critical Care Teams (ECCTs) represent a scarce and lifesaving clinical resource. Despite its operational and system-level significance, the allocation of ECCTs remains under-researched.
Methods
We conducted a methodological development study using the P.A.T.H.S. framework (Participants, Artefacts, Transition Stages, Historicity, Setting). We designed and piloted this in our previous work under the 999 R.E.S.P.O.N.D. project, which examined the decision-making process for ECCT dispatch. We applied P.A.T.H.S. to 17 dispatch cases (comprising 100 decision-making episodes). We analysed five data sources: recordings of emergency calls and internal dispatch-related interactions, sequence-of-events records, policy documents, and ethnographic observations. A four-phase analysis—indexing & data mapping, transcription & coding, charting, and synthesising & outputs—was undertaken taking Interactional Sociolinguistics as the theoretical approach and methodology.
Results
P.A.T.H.S. enables the mapping of non-linear, multifactorial ‘textual trajectories’ across human and non-human actors. The case example presented herein illustrates how information on key risk indicators (e.g. mechanism of injury) were often delayed, fragmented, or lost between the caller, call-handler, and written records. P.A.T.H.S. provides a framework and analytical tool capturing the textual trajectory of information flow, and trace how dispatch decision making unfolds. We subsequently developed a template and codebook for other researchers to further study complex decision making in multi-actoral systems using a textual trajectory approach.
Conclusion
This methodological development work demonstrates the potential of P.A.T.H.S. to capture and clarify complex decision-making processes. P.A.T.H.S. offers a practical and theoretically grounded framework for future research, training, and policy that addresses risk points in communication between oral and written forms among teams of actors, to support optimal deployment of scarce resources.
