Standards and Compliance

[Randy L'Heureux <medicwest@home.com>]

Greetings from the great brown north. We are about to begin a tribunal 
regarding staffing issues and our airevac program is to be included. In the 
past we have had little to no success of increasing staff based on call 
volumes and predictable work. To understand how this works you have to be a 
fan of the cartoon Dilbert.

We will now be changing our approach and presenting data on our response 
times, in particular the time from dispatch to being airborne. The only 
standard we currently have within our policies and procedures is a one hour 
wheels up time for our fixed wing aircraft on priority one red flights. 
This is a very old standard that was developed in the 70's (a wonderful 
time) when we did not have crew assigned to the airport stations. The only 
standard for our rotary wing program is that the pilots and aircraft must 
be able to be airborne within ten minutes of accepting a flight. The key 
here is that it is the pilots and aircraft that must be ready in ten 
minutes, not the flight crew. Our airevac crews are not stationed with the 
helicopters.

I would appreciate feedback on your programs standards for fixed and rotary 
liftoff times and what is your acceptable percentage of compliance to the 
standard. The other question I have is to the programs that utilize remote 
base staffing. In particular I am interested in hearing from the programs 
that fly a machine out to a remote base in the morning and then return it 
at night. While this would seem like a good idea for one of our bases, it 
would be a hard sell to our managers because the aircraft would be flying 
two empty legs each day.

Any comments on the above would be met with Canadian appreciation (much 
better value than the Canadian dollar). If you have particular insight to 
increasing staffing levels I would like to hear that as well. I think a lot 
of these questions could be answered by the Airmed conference this year but 
the tribunal will be finished by then.

Fly safe
Randy L'Heureux
Ambulance Paramedics of British Columbia


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