Helicopters are used to transport flight paramedics to remote locations.
Paramedic services are a familiar part of most communities and calling an ambulance is a nearly universal way to receive emergency care, at least in urban areas. For outlying communities, as well as for disaster situations and many military operations, emergency medical services often arrive by air. A flight paramedic is an emergency medical technician, or EMT, who specializes in air transportation of sick or injured patients. Flight paramedics are responsible for stabilizing patients in the field, treating them in flight, and ultimately getting them to a hospital with a full report of injuries and treatments performed.
Flight paramedics are responsible for stabilizing patients in the field.
At a basic level, a flight paramedic is a medical provider with specialized training in trauma situations. Flight crews are generally dispatched only for extreme emergency situations. They are being asked to transport critical patients when driving to a hospital could take longer than the untreated patient would survive. The role of the flight paramedic is to find the injured person or injured parties at the scene, stabilize them for air travel, load them onto the plane, and treat them en route to surgery or specialized hospital care.
Flight paramedics may be dispatched to pick up seriously injured patients after an accident.
Flight paramedics are often considered part of the paramedic elite, as one generally must have many years of experience in the field before qualifying to join an emergency flight team. Performing medical treatments and procedures in an airplane or helicopter is a slightly different science than in the back of a moving ambulance. While the required procedures are generally the same, factors such as altitude and air quality can affect how they should be performed.
To join a flight team, a paramedic generally must have at least five years of critical care EMT experience, although specific requirements vary by jurisdiction. Most of the time, an aspiring flight paramedic must also obtain flight paramedic certification. Certification is typically achieved by passing a series of exams that address the details of the flight trauma experience.
Medical flights are usually dispatched with a team of medical transport personnel that includes at least one flight nurse and one flight paramedic, as well as at least one aircraft pilot. The flight paramedic is almost always superior in position and skill to the nurse, but in most situations they work as a team. In practice, both the nurse and the paramedic act as a flight paramedic on the job. The pilot is generally not a medical professional.
There are a number of paramedic careers that focus on flying. In rural communities, nearly all serious accidents and injuries require transport by helicopter or plane, and paramedics recruited for these positions must be ready and willing to fly. Flight paramedics in urban areas respond to mass casualty situations when nearby hospitals are overcrowded, and also transport critical patients between hospitals in certain circumstances. Most military medics are also trained and certified as flight paramedics, especially those stationed in war zones or more desolate regions of the world.