Healthcare (EMS) · Event medical dispatch and live site map platform
Life Line Ambulances: live incident dispatch for large events
Life Line Ambulances provides medical cover at large events, where incidents used to be called in by radio and located from verbal descriptions. We built a dispatch platform with a live site map, handset incident reporting and an organiser view, cutting average dispatch response at large events from 9 minutes to 90 seconds across 340 events in its first year. It was built in 9 weeks.
- Client
- Life Line Ambulances
- Industry
- Healthcare (EMS)
- Built
- Web and mobile
- Timeframe
- 9 weeks
What changed
- 9 min to 90 secaverage dispatch response at large events
- 340 events coveredin the first year, with up to 60,000 attendees each
- ~70% less radioestimated, as routine coordination moved to structured data
- Real-time positionscrew locations visible to organisers, replacing status requests by phone
- On-scene recordsincident documentation completed at the scene instead of reconstructed hours later
- 9 weekstotal build time
Results as reported for this build after launch.
The challenge
Medical cover at events depended on manual coordination between dispatch teams and event organisers. At high attendance events that caused slower responses and confusion about who was where.
Event medical cover has long run on radios and mobile phones. A first aider at a festival sees someone collapse, calls it in on a handheld, and a dispatcher has to work out from a spoken description which part of a forty-acre site they mean and which crew is nearest.
That holds up at a small event. With sixty thousand people, patchy signal and three stages running, it breaks down. Life Line had seen crews sent to the wrong gate, and had worked events where the organiser and the medical provider disagreed on how many medical staff were actually on site.
Neither side had a shared picture. Organisers phoned the medical lead for updates, pulling that person away from coordinating care at exactly the wrong moment. Everyone knew it was a problem, and nobody had a tool that solved it.
What we built
We built an event EMS coordination platform that structures resource allocation, dispatch and team communication, working alongside existing emergency systems rather than replacing them.
Incidents are raised and located on the event's own site map, the nearest suitable crew is dispatched, organisers see coverage without calling anyone, and the whole system keeps working offline on site.
Live map on the event's own site plan
Crew positions, static posts and incident pins sit on the event's site plan instead of a street map, because gate numbers and stage names are how people on the ground find their way.
Few-tap incident reporting
Staff raise an incident from a handset with category, severity and location in a few taps.
Skill-matched dispatch
Dispatch assigns each call to the nearest appropriate crew, matching skill level to the incident.
Read-only organiser view
Organisers see coverage and open incidents in real time, which ended the update calls without exposing any patient detail.
On-scene patient records and audit trail
Patient records are captured at the scene against the incident, including handover to an ambulance service when transport is needed. Everything is timestamped automatically, producing the post-event report and the audit trail insurers and licensing authorities ask for.
Offline operation
The system runs offline on site and syncs when the connection returns.
Screens and design system
The result
Dropping from nine minutes to ninety seconds is the clinically important number, and most of that gain came from no longer relying on spoken descriptions of location, not from anyone moving faster.
On the commercial side, the shared organiser view became an advantage in tenders. Life Line now wins contracts partly on the reporting it can give a licensing authority, a side effect of the audit trail rather than something we set out to design.
