October 2006

Media Monitor

Despite the dramatic growth in air medical services (AMS) in the last decade, a public policy paper circulated nationally in August by the Foundation for Air-medical Research & Education ( FARE) claims that, “[T]he need for increased access to ever scarcer specialty care resources, and the increased need to make such care mobile, will increase the need for AMS.” The paper points out that: “AMS has been shown to be cost-effective when looking at total medical cost as well as lives saved.” The AMS team “generally has physician-level capabilities exceeding those of ground ALS providers” and “helicopters more closely resemble a ‘flying emergency department’ than simply an air- borne version of the typical BLS or ALS-level ground ambulance.” Concerning safety, the paper describes steps being taken to make AMS safer, but acknowledges that AMS is complex and conducted in hostile environmental conditions and that “risk cannot be completely eliminated.” It concludes that it is “imperative that policy and funding support the availability and sustainability of AMS to every community.”

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