That does not happen in Scotland.


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Dear hospital planners, examples for consideration.

Helimed 2 landing at Raigmore Hospital, Inverness.
R948 at Raigmore.

R900 landing at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.
R900 at the ARI again.

There was a news story recently where a UK Helimed landed in a car park to pick up a casualty and the pilot PAYED the parking fee.

JimF, loved the videos........ However......... the acres of space around those areas is mightily impressive. Most hospital landing sites around here are jammed inbetween buildings or have cars parked RIGHT up to the borders, all the way around. If there is any space, it has a building erected or a car park opened there. The HLS at Warrington hospital is 2 miles away from the site!! At visiting times there isnt a single free space within a mile; gold bars are worth less than a car parking space.

I appreciate the point you are trying make jayteeto and clearly there are different problems with space in different cities.

However, this is like the thousands of small business owner across the country who do not have space for a truck to deliver their orders.

If the hospital was built in 1852 then I can see how there was no plan for a HLS. It's 2016 and HEMS and SAR helicopters are not going away any time soon. Half-baked after-thoughts are being accepted far too easily.

Whilst I pointed out that there are helipads the Sea Kings cannot use, I didn't mean to imply that it's not a big deal.

I work in a rural hospital that is about 2 hours away from the nearest big hospital by blue-light ambulance and 3 hours away from the major trauma centre. We don't have a helipad and even though the landing field is only a few minutes away by ambulance, this slows things down no end.

Firstly you need an ambulance to take the patient to the helicopter. Whilst ambulance availability is generally OK here, it's by no means guaranteed. As we all know, the NHS is falling apart and we're starting to see patients come to harm because there are no free ambulances in the county, on a reasonably regular basis. If you need to involve an extra ambulance then this brings the potential for lengthy delays and also is a big drain on resources - e.g. the ambulance may need to travel 45 minutes to get to the hospital then 45 minutes to get back on station after the transfer.

Secondly, ambulance and air ambulance equipment often isn't quite compatible. Say you have a patient in the emergency department with an unstable spinal fracture (known or suspected). You really want to minimise transfers and log-rolls as much as possible to avoid causing further injury, but to transfer a patient from a hospital trolley to an ambulance trolley involves a whole rigmarole of spinal boards and teams of people. If you then need to transfer the patient from the ambulance trolley to the air ambulance then you have to repeat this whole exercise. It's all time consuming and risky.

Thirdly is the issue of handover - if you're in an ambulance or air ambulance you need to know something about the patient you're looking after, which means that you need to be briefed, which takes time. In order for the air ambulance crew to know about the patient they either need to be brought to the emergency department or for the ambulance crew to tell them all about their injuries and previous medical history or for someone from the ED to go out and brief them. Games of 'Chinese Whispers' don't facilitate clear communication and again, moving staff about to facilitate handover takes an age and delays the whole process.

I'll confess I only have anything to do with air ambulances a few times a year, but my general impression is that the whole process above can easily take half an hour or so. If you have to repeat it at the other end then the utility of the air ambulance (journey time of half an hour rather than two hours) is greatly reduced - you're only saving half an hour whilst increasing the risks of miscommunication or injury on transfer. And this is in a rural area where the advantages of helicopter transport should be most compelling.

Helicopter transfer is great if you can put the patient in a lift, get them out on the helipad then magic-carpet them to wherever they need to be. If you can't, then frankly often-as-not you may as well not bother and the money would be far better spent on road ambulances. Obviously SAR helicopters have a role in rescue as well as transfer, but still.... if you can't deliver patients to the door then you're hobbled.

Some really good points there. Even the Raigmore and ARI sites are using emergency ambulances as site transport to get the patient to/from the building. These sites are lucky enough to have major ambulance stations next door but that may not help with the handover issue.

Have a look at Swansea Morriston and Southampton General Hospitals - they built the HLS over the car park so you can still park cars underneath and have a high strength helipad on top.

There is ALWAYS an option, Swansea and Southampton are great, but SOMEONE has to pay for it to be built.......... 1 million for a helipad means a lot of cancelled operations and clinics. There just isn't enough money.

PS. Didnt a charity build one of the above pads?

TFIC isn't a raised helipad a waste of a potential multistorey carpark?

A million?

Chicken feed.

One person slips just over the edge from survival to the alternative because of an excessive chain of handling, chinese whispers, excessive delay, lack of ambulance (abgd has the list) and it costs the state what in real money? Well, the numbers I am hearing from the justice system for the cost to the state of an accidental death mean saving that one person pays for your million pound helipad. When the person returns to working health and pays taxes: bonus!

since charities pay for the air ambos in the first place then why not?

If that was a valid argument, all hospitals would build multi-storey carparks on their existing car park areas. With the raised helipad, you keep your existing parking revenue and get a decent helipad right outside the front door.

The heli pad is just the roof on the open top level of the multi story car park.

SLB

Sorry but just because the RAF and RN Seakings could land on the RVI pad does not mean it was safe. They were allowed to by a relative lack of regulation. However each approach had varying degrees of exposure where an engine failure would result in a large hole in the hospital or city centre. An S92 is much less exposed in this regard and that's before you consider the likelihood of engine failure between the two types.

Also the RVI site limited arrivals on the top lad to six minutes if I recall due to some design issues with their intensive care ventilation. As this was not normally long enough to transfer a casualty and recover the winchman a second take off and landing was expected with all the extra risk involved in that.

It's not fair to blame Bristow for this. The regulations are much tighter for civilian operations and there are good safety reasons for this. Although no regulation precluded RAF Seakings from using the top lad some people in the RAF elected to use the RVI bottom site for the reasons outlined above.

It would be interesting to observe the alternative universe where the government bought S-92 and AW149 for SAR Force and the FAA SAR flights. It might be that with new modern types and the slow but steady march of the MAA the regulatory environment would not be so different.

Back in this universe, the CAA have done an amazing job in relation to regulating SAR but in this case there is more than 4 aircrew, an aircraft, a casualty and a piece of rock to think about: not forgetting an insurance company and an HR Director. Lifesaving flight in a SAR tasking invokes CAP 999 but a building full of sick people in a congested area invokes common sense and clearly a number of hospital authorities are not playing their part.