Not so much that I think, but they have been called out and want to justify getting airborne by making a heroic rescue. I don't know how many winching jobs they got a year but if it wasn't many they may have seen it as an ideal time to practice their 'skills'!

The decision to transport is made by on scene ground personnel based on patient condition, mechanism of injury, etc. The aircrew has no say in it.

And therein lies the first problem. Only the aircrew will be fully aware of the risk of winching. They should be qualified clinically to make an assessment as to whether the risk of a winch is justified by the casualties condition. A clinical ground party cannot make the decision and non clinically trained aircrew cannot make the decision. You need a wholistic solution otherwise errors and mistakes will continue to occur.

The second problem was how the aircrew dealt with the spin and enough has been said about that already!

My answer had to do with the decision to call for a transport by air. The aircrew always has the right to refuse based on weather, LZ suitability, or other operational issues.
Patient condition is assessed by the first responders and they call for air transport in accordance with their protocols. Generally the only time the aircrew would refuse to transport based on patient condition would be if they were not stable enough for transport.

A professional outfit would have winched one of the crew down - and if you don't have medically qualified rear crew why are you transporting casualties in the first place - who would have given a full assessment based on medical and aviation knowledge. They would also have ensured the ground party knew how to use a line to stabilise the stretcher.

The ground party may have asked for the helicopter but the crew can make the decision not to winch.

Just amateur-hour all round.

I have a friend that was involved in a similar incident in NSW many moons ago and the consequences of the spin were greater than the original injury. It was particularly noticeable in his eyes and I've never asked if he suffered permanent damage to them from the spin. Given it was Australia many years ago I suspect he simply got on with life as well as he could.

From the video, the terrain looked like it might have been possible to land on nearby, removing the need to winch in the first place!

How do we know what the Helicopter Crew was "thinking"?

Is there a Investigative Report available for this event that has findings for that?

We have the one news article linked reporting the settlement of the Civil Suit.

What stands out to me from that article is the following statement.

I see more far more problems than a terribly bad Winching.....as bad as that was....the insistence by the Ground Units the Patient be Winched is the main problem that set up the failure by the Helicopter Crew.

The question that should be addressed is just why that happened....how far was it to a site where the Helicopter could be landed and the Patient ground loaded?

If it had been a Private EMS operator and the Patient refused Air Transport....that would have ended it right there and she would have gone by ground.

What Authority does the Fire Department and EMS have to overrule that Patient Refusal especially in light of her not having any critical need for transport?

Was the Helicopter Crew advised of the patient's refusal?

If so did the Crew look for a ground landing site adjacent to where the patient was located?

What alternatives were available for moving the patient by Winch?

I just see it as a problem with the city Fire Dept..........

The performance of a crew on a task may just be reflective of managements ethos - we can't afford to spend money on training, we can't afford to send people to industry forums to gain an education. You are consigned to working in a sheltered workshop tending mushrooms.

Agreed Megan and the result is an operational echo chamber

The head and thereby the brain are spun at a radius of about half the size of the human. Therefore a signifcant centrifgual force will applied to the brain and blood will be pumped into Head and Brain at relatively high pressure. And for the head these are negative g's, where humans are much less toelrant than positive g's. In this case, assuming a radius of ~0,75m and a rate of ~2 gyrations per second I arrive at >-10g. Which as a sustainend load is quite a bit.
But I just saw the damage to the brain/head this case was not too big. I was concerned it might have led to intracranial hemorrage.

Additionally there is the point that they would have had to land somewhere anyway as from my fading memory I am pretty sure you can not get the stretcher/litter into the cabin from the winch on the A109 in flight.