There are two helicopter companies in my area. All of their helicopters are at remote bases now rather than in Columbus. Some are on airport grounds and some are at fire stations. IIRC the number of medical helicopters in Ohio has doubled or tripled since 2000, so there’s usually one fairly close by.
If it sounds like it will be needed, a helicopter can be put on standby so it will be ready to fly right away if it turns out that they need to fly the patient. Sometimes the helicopter company will decide to go ahead and launch just in case, so they’re assured of being the closest one (and getting the $20k for them and not the rival company).
All of the hospitals have helipads but I believe at the non-trauma centers they’re almost always for patients going out, not in.
and what appears to be a remote base isn’t by helicopter standards. Once in the air there it’s a quick shot anywhere in the city for a machine that travels at 160 mph in a straight line with no traffic. From Rickenbacker Airport to the center of Columbus is 11 miles.
I have a friend who is a flight nurse, he works out of Richmond but most of his flights are to SW Virginia where it’s insanely mountainous and the roads are serpentine. While I’m sure it’s different everywhere, I once asked him if he basically deals with only the most gruesome injuries (my assumption was that if the helicopter shows up it’s really a bad accident), he said that a lot of his flights are just to pick people up from very small rural hospitals who aren’t necessarily “omg bleeding everywhere” but who just need to be in Richmond for surgery or something and they’ve decided it’s best not to send them over the horrific SW Virginia road system where it’d be a 2-3 hour trip with constant bumps and turns.
He says you obviously do see some of the hardcore car accidents, but it’s not as much as people would assume, in his area the lion’s share are not that immediate trauma type stuff.
I saw a helicopter land on this overpass during rushour after an accident. There are three stoplights on the bridge there and the accident happened at an end one. At rush hour everything backed up very quickly, and I imagine a ambulance had no chance of getting to the scene as we had been sitting on one of the on ramps for about 15 minutes without moving.
It was pretty cool. Good thing the light poles are far enough apart (wonder if it was designed that way).
Most sedans on the road can’t do 150 MPH even pushed to their limits on favorable roads, much less big heavy ambulances. I imagine the story’s been exaggerated.
Another good use for them is sitting at-the-ready at places where people are very likely to be injured. At major automobile races, for instance. At the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, they won’t even green-flag an IndyCar practice session – much less a race – unless there’s a medical helicopter on the ground ready to fly. There’s a medical center on-site for minor stuff and post-crash checks, but if they are taking someone to Methodist Hospital (which isn’t far) and minutes count, they’re going via helicopter.
If you’re interested in the stories of a race car medical team director, check out a book called “Rapid Response” by Dr. Steve Olvey (no connection here, it’s just a really good book).
They are generally used to transport patients from hospitals that are not equipped for a specialized and urgent treatment,to a major medical center that has unusual treatment centers not found in every hospital. Such as a transplant, or certain kinds of burns or orthopedic challenges.
The air ambulance at the hospital near me in central London seems, from the incidences I’ve seen reported, to respond mostly to road traffic accidents.
RTAs cause congestion just becaue they’re RTAs, so it would be really difficult for an ambulance to get through - as much as the drivers might want to move aside for an ambulance, there isn’t always somewhere for them to to move to, and that would be the same for every single car over a distance of maybe 40 miles (the local helicopter is supposed to cover 40 miles and 40 miles from central London is a long, slow drive at peak times; it can take hours in a normal car even without bad traffic).
So yes, those helicopters must save time.
ETA: the hospital has a helicopter pad on the roof. Most motorways in England are bounded by farmland for large stretches. Landing is not a big problem, I think; if it were, I guess an air ambulance wouldn’t be requested.
In the Cayman Islands our police helicopter is used to transport patients on rare occasion but is not fully kitted out as an air ambulance. One potential use is in transporting a serious patient from one of the smaller islands over 90 miles of open ocean to the main island where the better equipped hospital is located.
Use of the helicopter for such a transfer could save many hours. But if the schedule of the national airline’s fixed wing aircraft is suitable then preferably patients would be transferred on Cayman Airways.
Here in Houston, the answer is that they can save a bunch of time, which can and does save lives. The Medical Center and our hospital systems are world-class. Unfortunately, so are our traffic jams. Most of the time, an ambulance will wind up driving on a sidewalk or in the opposite lanes of traffic to get around it, but in critical cases. they’ll fly the bird because of the time savings.
There’s a lot of debate on this topic in EMS circles. There’s so much variation in ambulance and air ambulance services from city-to-city that it’s difficult to come up with a satisfactory answer that will apply everywhere.
While an air ambulance can obviously travel faster than a ground ambulance, there’s other factors involved. The air ambulance needs more time to respond- it needs to be ordered, since AFAIK there’s nowhere where air medical is dispatched as a primary response by a 911 call center. The pilot needs to check the weather and accept the mission. Then the helicopter needs to be prepped and take off. When it gets to the scene, it needs to have a landing zone secured. All of this negates some of the speed advantage of the helicopter.
As far as the other questions go, it depends on where you live. I work in a large urban system and we have ambulances dynamically deployed throughout the city; we don’t respond from stations. This is guaranteed to vary depending on where you live.
The air ambulance may or may not be better equipped than the ground ambulance in your area. Around here there’s essentially no difference in equipment or scope of practice. There’s a key difference that’s somewhat unique to Colorado, though. The air ambulances here are very small because they need to fly over the continental divide. There’s very few things they can do for patient care in flight because there isn’t the space.
For me, working in an urban area, there’s no chance I’d call for a helicopter. By the time they got in the air I could be well on my way to a trauma center. For a more rural area with a long transport time to a trauma center (or other definitive care) it probably makes more sense to use an air ambulance.
