Description
The London Ambulance
Service introduced a new computer-aided despatch system in
1992 which was intended to automate the system that despatched
ambulances in response to calls from the public and the emergency
services. This new system was extremely inefficient and ambulance
response times increased markedly. Shortly after its introduction,
it failed completely and LAS reverted to the previous manual
system. The systems failure was not just due to technical
issues but to a failure to consider human and organisational
factors in the design of the system.
Use in teaching
I
supplement the material in the book in a course I teach on critical
systems with additional material focusing on security and human/organisational
factors. I use this case study in a discussion of human factors
as an illustration of how procurement, human and organisational
issues can be major contributors to system failure.
Related chapters
Chapter
2: Socio-technical systems
Supporting
documents
Human
and organisational issues
My
slides giving an overview of human and organisational issues
as they affect critical systems. Download the PDF version
of the slides from here.
Overview
of the LAS failure
My Powerpoint
presentation giving an overview of the problem. Download
the PDF version of the slides from here.
Report
on the LAS failure
A post-mortem
report on the causes of the failure of the LAS system.
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