RE: Flying patients to other hospitals

["Laurie A. Romig, MD" <laurie.romig@verizon.net>]

Larry:

Part of what may affect the viability of this decision is your mission
profile and the capabilities of your hospital. If your mission profile is
such that you do primarily interfacility transfers, most already come to
your hospital, and you're already missing or delaying flights back to your
facility because of a few other third facility flights, then the decision
might be justifiable. If you do any scene flights at all, then you've got to
take into account state EMS and/or trauma regulations and regional or local
EMS plans for destination decisions. Your hospital may have the same
capabilities as other hospitals that you might have gone to, but may or may
not require a clinically or regulatory significant difference in flight
time. Or your facility may not have the capabilities that other potential
destination hospitals do, in which case, you may not be doing what's best
for the patient. What you definitely don't want to have happen is ground EMS
(and the patient's family) believing that you're headed for hospital X, when
you're actually headed back to your facility. Philosophical/procedural
changes like this need to be communicated and understood in advance. And the
idea of unilaterally changing an interfacility destination without
permission of the sending physician is simply unthinkable, short of factors
like weather and mechanical problems. Attempting to change referral patterns
in order to increase the number of flights back to your hospital is quite a
chore; if your program is tasked with attempting to do this, I hope that you
have considerable backup from your medical staff and PR folks.

My program has the luxury of operating as a "patient transport agency"
without allegiance to any one facility, even though we are still hospital
owned. Other programs in the state do still mostly operate as "mobile front
doors" for their hospitals. I much prefer my situation!

Laurie Romig, MD
Bayflite, St. Pete, FL

> -----Original Message-----
> From: flightmed-admin@flightweb.com
> [mailto:flightmed-admin@flightweb.com]On Behalf Of Paul M. Wright, Jr.
> Sent: Saturday, August 11, 2001 12:00 PM
> To: flightmed@flightweb.com
> Subject: RE: Flying patients to other hospitals
>
>
> > >If you accept a flight for a physician at another facility to
> transfer a
> > >patient to yet a third facility then the patient goes to that
> > >third facility.
> > >Those were the terms under which you accepted the flight.
> > >
>
> A point well-taken, but I would hope that the communication center would
> have been informed of the policy and would decline the flight at
> the time of
> the request.  Clearly, once the flight has been accepted, the program is
> obligated to do what they have agreed to do.
>
> regards!
>
> paul
>
> Paul M. Wright, Jr.
> Mesa, AZ
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Flightmed mailing list


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