Search Results

Ambulances are largely exempt from crashworthiness and occupant protection passive safety design standards in the USA, and have a poor road safety record. This comparative evaluation of USA ‘concept safety’ ambulances and a standard Australian ambulance is based on basic principles of crashworthiness and available crash test data. There are features of USA ambulance design that are not within known principles and technical aspects of crashworthiness and safety design, and include some predictable serious occupant protection hazards. The USA ambulance industry should recognize and apply crashworthiness and occupant protection principles to reduce current system failures for this fleet of essential service vehicles.

There has been very limited research on the biomechanics of occupant safety in the ambulance environment. Occupant protection or crash testing safety standards for these unique vehicles are lacking in the United States. Recent studies have identified ambulances as high risk passenger transport vehicles. This study was conducted to identify some of the occupant safety hazards in the ambulance environment and to determine the efficacy of some countermeasures to mitigate ambulance occupant injury. Accelerator sled testing of the ambulance rear patient compartment (ambulance box or rear cabin) with Anthropomorphic Test Devices was conducted under frontal impact conditions with a target sled pulse was 26 G and 30 mph. The ambulance box was configured with instrumented and uninstrumented Anthropomorphic Test Devices positioned as in the real world environment.

Ambulances have different performance needs and structural design compared to standard passenger vehicles. Also occupants in the ambulance rear patient compartment maybe side facing, rear facing or recumbent. There is also no USA dynamic safety standard for testing the ambulance patient compartment occupant or equipment restraint systems. This study describes an accelerator sled test conducted of an ambulance rear cabin environment which demonstrates some optimal restraint practices for pediatric patients and also the interaction between the different occupants and the need for effective restraint systems. The goal of this study was to analyze occupant kinematics and forces generated in a model of an ambulance crash, and to test injury-mitigating countermeasures for both pediatric and adult occupants.