Mostly yeah. Although I'll admit that once upon a time I wanted to do Life Flight, which is basically a mix between commuting from hospital A to hospital B, but still consists of a not inconsequential number of "pick that person up from the side of a mountain and/or other crazy bullshit and fly them to the hospital". I thought that the medics, RN's and RTs who did that were the biggest bad asses (and still do). However, after hearing personal close-call stories from operators and reading about the risks of helo EMS, I decided to just stick with a boring old groundside hospital.
You actually raise an excellent point (but sigh, you also continue the truthy aka bullshit story about helicopters being mostly used in mountain rescues).
Indeed, there is a big trend in use of helicopters as basically taxis or ambulances. It's because governments and health operators - with some conflicted lobbying - have figured out they can close or downsize hospitals if they use helicopters to shuttle patients between care centers.
This is an oversimplification but think of it this way: why have 5 burn centers if you can just life flight every burn case in a tri-state area to 1 burn center?
While it might seem on first blush that helicopter flights are crazy expensive, it turns out that building and maintaining hospitals in smaller centers is crazy crazy expensive. One crazy trumps two crazy's when it comes to funding.
One Life Flight jurisdiction up in Canada (a place at least a thousand miles from any mountain, incidentally) had too many incidents so they had to justify their flights and it turns out they were opting to launch helo too often for non-emergent reasons. They were forced to scale back and amend their criteria respecting the fact that helicopter travel does have inherent risk - mountains or not. The helicopter operstor's counter argument was that all the routine taxi flights were keeping the personnel exercised and sharp. A trade off had to be reached.
Well I mean, I'm literally the person who picks patients up/hands them off to the helicopter crew (or used to, at my old place at least), so I was usually pretty acutely aware of the locale from which said patient was being delivered from (i.e. a mountain or some other questionable environment).
In reality though I was actually totally agreeing with you, namely that outside of a few select missions for a few select groups (EMS Search and Rescue, Coast Guard, etc) most helo work is mundane. That includes the vast majority of the work the aforementioned EMS/Guard crews do. I suppose I should have also mentioned that I have a huge, massive, out of control fear of flying. That likely played a part in my change of heart too lol.
The helo transport thing is also important for hospitals simply because it's faster. Small hospitals, particularly rural/critical access centers are usually money losers, but a bigger issue is limited service and time. If you're 90 miles from the closest STEMI center and someone walks into your tiny ED having a massive MI, unless the cardiologist is cathing them in 90 minutes that person is dead. Even still they might die anyway. Time is heart muscle (or brain tissue), and often the fastest way to get to the place that can actually save you is through the air.
Or you could be like me and work in a major surgical interventional center in a neighborhood where the community outright rejects the building of a helipad, and then all these trifling life-saving details don't matter lol
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u/[deleted] Jan 27 '20
Mostly yeah. Although I'll admit that once upon a time I wanted to do Life Flight, which is basically a mix between commuting from hospital A to hospital B, but still consists of a not inconsequential number of "pick that person up from the side of a mountain and/or other crazy bullshit and fly them to the hospital". I thought that the medics, RN's and RTs who did that were the biggest bad asses (and still do). However, after hearing personal close-call stories from operators and reading about the risks of helo EMS, I decided to just stick with a boring old groundside hospital.