Originally Posted by
Same again
Obtaining accurate medical information on the casualty and the severity of the injury is often an issue, particularly when English is not the mother tongue of the crew. Often the fishing fleets in the Atlantic are not from home shores.
Which is why declining a task on the basis of sketchy information is a concern. Ideally - as in this case - a shore-based doctor can advise, or in the case of large cruise ships, a doctor is part of the crew. Lacking this, the advice of our own Paramedic is invaluable and helps in the decision making process.
It is ultimately the Commander's (often both pilots are Captains) responsibility to make the go/no go decision but I want to be happy that, either way, the other crew believe we are making the correct decision.
For those who are not involved in SAR - here's how the tasking process works for us:
In Canada, at JRCC Halifax, the radio-medical consultations are (or were when I was a RCAF SMC there) routed to a contracted civilian Doctor in the provincial health care system who takes what information may be gleaned, often through a language barrier, and makes a decision whether the injury is worthy of a helo extraction.
The SMC then contacts (frequently conference calls) a RCAF Flight Surgeon who either concurs with the decision or not. The idea being that, unlike the civilian Doc, the RCAF Doc understands the risks associated with a helo hoist extraction and can therefore make an educated risk assessment. If the RCAF Doc concurs that a helo extraction is warranted then the helo crew is fully briefed with all details of the injury and tasked with the mission.
With the knowledge of the level of injury, the aircraft commander and crew then assesses the weather, aircraft, crew, mission and threats; they make a yea/nea decision and either spin up and go or make a plan for when they can go in the future - when the weather/range to vessel or whatever has changed (risk level, essentially) enough to make mission success most likely.
Did we have what I considered unwarranted missions? Definitely.
Am I a Doctor? No.
I have, however, had my hands on the controls and my guys on a hoist in risk/return situations that
I would describe as...asymmetric. Maybe we should be hoisting more doctors from boats at night in sea state 5, 180NM out!
To my knowledge our EMS/lifeflight crews are not briefed on the details of the injury until they make the weather call to accept the mission, but I'm sure there is a Canuck air ambulance guy out there who can confirm that.
We almost always send a fixed wing top cover platform out with the rescue bird to provide eyes on in case of an accident as well as a comms platform. We use Hercs here (for the moment) and they will commonly orbit and drop flares to try to give a horizon for hoisting. It works sometimes.
I find the idea of the SARTech/Flight Engineer (hoist operator) having a say in the go/no go decision interesting but I think it would only work when you're on top the vessel with the door open, hook in hand and they can see what they are getting into. Even then I don't think it would work as it's been my experience that those guys will jump into lava to rescue someone.