HEMS Critical Facts: Access to Definitive Health Care for Rural Americans
According to the Journal of the American Medical Associa- tion, “46.7 million Americans living in rural areas are more than an hour away from a Level 1 or 2 trauma center, even with the number of air and ground ambulance services available today.” According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “Rural trauma victims are twice as likely to die from an accident or medical condition versus an urban victim due to failure to arrive at a hospital within the golden hour. According to the Association of Air Medical Services, “Numerous changes in the nation’s delivery of health care have made the trauma and tertiary care centers a vital hub for outlying hospitals. The result is an increasing need to transport a greater number of patients’ longer distances for complex, time-dependent care, such as primary cardiac intervention, strokes and complex surgery. • Rural hospitals have undergone changes in mission and structure during the last 20 years. In an effort to help maintain a sufficient number of hospitals, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have developed the Critical Access Hospital Program, which pays the full cost for Medicare beneficiaries. This has come in exchange for structural changes in the hospital which
Cleaves – The Air Evac Lifeteam
was established by a group of local citizens to provide air medical transpor- tation and ensure access to emergency health care for their remote community in West Plains, in the Missouri Ozark region. Although air ambulances were primarily based in metropolitan areas at the time, the company founders believed that the people who needed air medical transport the most were those living in rural areas, often far away from a hospi- tal. That was in 1985. Today, the Air Evac Lifeteam has
grown to be the largest independently owned and operated membership- supported air ambulance service in the United States, operating more than 110 bases across 15 states. As the company has evolved since 1985, it has remained true to its original mission and patient- first focus through an unwavering dedication to: • Remaining an independent pro- vider, which makes it possible to impartially work with other health care providers, includ- ing more than 1,700 diverse referral sources representing more than
Pima County Sheriff Relies on the Dependability of
include reducing beds to 25 or less and shortening average length of stay to less than 96 hours. The goal is to keep hospitals open, which is a tremendous benefit to rural communities. However, it also leads to a concurrent need to transfer patients with complex health conditions to distant trauma and tertiary care centers, requiring a rapid and even more sophisticated medical transport system.
• Increasing numbers of hospitals, even in rural areas, are on diversion status due to lack of bed availability and access to specialty physicians. This diversion, often requiring transport to distant facilities, is now becoming commonplace throughout the country.
• A decreasing number of specialist physicians — general, orthopedic and neurosurgeons — has reduced the avail- ability of emergency specialty care at community hospi- tals, making it necessary to refer patients to trauma and tertiary centers either directly from accident scenes or in secondary transfers from the emergency department. According to the American Hospital Association, “In the past 10 years, there has been an 8 percent decline in the number of emergency departments in community hospitals. This is a trend that is expected to continue.”
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HelicopterMaintenanceMagazine.com 31
Photo by Brent Bundy
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