Determining What Proportion of Helicopter Emergency Medical Services-Transported Patients Are Urban Versus Rurally Based: A Retrospective 36-Year Geospatial Analysis of a Critical Care Helicopter Emergency Medical Services Organization's Patient Transports.
Air Medical Journal · 2024-01-01 · Observational study
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: There is an increased mortality rate of patients residing in rural compared with urban communities. Helicopter emergency medical services (HEMS) decrease both the time to hospital arrival and trauma mortality in patients originating from rural areas. An unreported number of urban residents are served by HEMS. Our objective was to quantify the fraction of urban residents who live in the adjoining city of a HEMS base and are transferred by helicopter while they are in rural areas. METHODS: This was a retrospective analysis of HEMS charts between 1985 and 2022. Records were assessed for patients' city and postal code. A secondary database was searched to assess mission location. RESULTS: Thirty-five thousand nine hundred seventy-one cases were analyzed; 3,871 (10.76%) cases involved patients residing within the urban area of an open HEMS base, and 32,100 (89.24%) did not. This contrasts with 2.04% of all missions conducted in urban areas. Cases flown with patients from outside of the 3 provinces were as follows: British Columbia (1,233/21,941; 5.3% of Alberta cases), international (988/35,971; 2.7% of total cases), Ontario (177/4,691; 3.6% of Manitoba cases), and other provinces combined (158/3,5971; 0.4% of total cases). CONCLUSION: We highlight the impact of HEMS, where it serves both rural residents and all people who work in, travel through, visit, or recreate across the areas that our HEMS supports.
Abstract © the authors or publisher, via PubMed. Reuse and removal
Tags
Critical care & advanced paramedics · Helicopter & air ambulance · Rural & remote · Urban
Related articles
- Rapid response car as a supplement to the helicopter in a physician-based HEMS system. (Acta Anaesthesiol Scand, 2004)
- Cleared to land? A nationwide analysis of emergency care hospital and HEMS infrastructure in Germany. (Scand J Trauma Resusc Emerg Med, 2025)
- Overcoming distance: an exploration of current practices of government and charity-funded critical care transport and retrieval organizations. (Scand J Trauma Resusc Emerg Med, 2023)
- Geographical alignment of prehospital critical care services with population need for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients. (Scand J Trauma Resusc Emerg Med, 2026)
- Outcomes of blunt trauma victims transported by HEMS from rural and urban scenes. (Prehosp Emerg Care, 2007)
- Defining a mission-based method to determine a HEMS unit's actual service area. (Scand J Trauma Resusc Emerg Med, 2019)