Air medical services are the use of aircraft, including both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to provide various kinds of medical care, especially prehospital, emergency and critical care to patients during aeromedical evacuation and rescue operations.
During World War I, air transport was used to provide medical evacuation – either from frontline areas or the battlefield itself.
In 1928, in Australia, John Flynn founded the Flying Doctor Service (later the Royal Flying Doctor Service), to provide a wide range of medical services to civilians in remote areas; these included from routine consultations with travelling general practitioners, to air ambulance evacuations and other emergency medical services.
Fixed wing military air ambulances came into regular use during World War II. Helicopters became more commonly used for such purposes during the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Later, helicopters were introduced to civilian health care, especially for shorter distances, in and around large cities: transporting paramedics or specialist doctors as needed and transporting patients to hospitals, especially for major trauma cases. Fixed-wing aircraft remained in use for long-distance medical transport.
Air medical services can travel faster and operate in a wider coverage area than a land ambulance. This makes them particularly useful in sparsely-populated rural areas.
Air medical services have a particular advantage for major trauma injuries. The controversial theory of the golden hour suggests that major trauma patients should be transported as quickly as possible to a specialist trauma center. Therefore, medical responders in a helicopter can provide both a higher level of care at the scene of a trauma and faster transport to a trauma center. They can also provide critical care when transporting patients from community hospitals to trauma centers.
Effective use of helicopter services for trauma depends on the ground responder's ability to determine whether the patient's condition warrants air medical transport.
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A stretcher, gurney, litter, or pram is an apparatus used for moving patients who require medical care. A basic type (cot or litter) must be carried by two or more people. A wheeled stretcher (known as a gurney, trolley, bed or cart) is often equipped with variable height frames, wheels, tracks, or skids. Stretchers are primarily used in acute out-of-hospital care situations by emergency medical services (EMS), military, and search and rescue personnel.
Aeromedical evacuation (AE) usually refers to the use of military transport aircraft to carry wounded personnel. The first recorded British ambulance flight took place in 1917 in the Sinai peninsula some 30 miles south of El Arish when a Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2c flew out a soldier in the Imperial Camel Corps who had been shot in the ankle during the raid on Bir el Hassana. The flight took 45 minutes; the same journey by land would have taken some 3 days.
Pre-hospital emergency medicine (abbreviated PHEM), also referred to as pre-hospital care, immediate care, or emergency medical services medicine (abbreviated EMS medicine), is a medical subspecialty which focuses on caring for seriously ill or injured patients before they reach hospital, and during emergency transfer to hospital or between hospitals. It may be practised by physicians from various backgrounds such as anaesthesiology, emergency medicine, intensive care medicine and acute medicine, after they have completed initial training in their base specialty.
Ce cours vise à présenter et à analyser la manière dont l'État intervient dans la fourniture de services publics, les principes servant à gérer les organisations publiques et l'influence des règles im