Revised June 2024
Reaffirmed September 2018
Originally approved April 2011
A joint position statement of the Air Medical Physician Association (AMPA), the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), the National Association of EMS Physicians (NAEMSP), and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM)
As an adjunct to this policy, ACEP has prepared a policy resource and education paper (PREP) titled "Appropriate and Safe Utilization of Helicopter Emergency Medical Services"
We believe:
That patients benefit from the appropriate utilization of helicopter emergency medical services (HEMS).
That EMS and regional healthcare systems must have and follow guidelines for HEMS utilization to facilitate proper patient selection and ensure clinical benefit. Clinical benefit may be provided by:
- Meaningfully shortening the time to delivery of definitive care to patients with time-sensitive medical conditions.
- Providing necessary specialized medical expertise or equipment to patients before and/or during transport.
- Providing extraction, evacuation, and/or rescue from environments that are difficult to access due to geography, weather, remote location, distance, and other factors that limit timely access to a patient or transport by ground EMS.
- Providing initiation or continuation of advanced or specialty care that is not otherwise available locally from hospital or ground EMS resources
That the decision to utilize HEMS is a medical decision, separate from the aviation determination whether a transport can safely be completed.
- Physicians with specialized training and experience in EMS and air medical transport must be integral to HEMS utilization decisions, including guideline development and HEMS quality improvement activities.
- Federal Aviation Administration approved Safety Management Systems must be developed, adopted, and adhered to by air medical operators when making decisions to accept and perform each and every HEMS transport.
That HEMS must be fully integrated within the local, regional, and state emergency health care system.
- HEMS programs cannot operate independent of the surrounding health care
- The EMS and health care system must be involved in the determination of the number of HEMS assets necessary to provide appropriate coverage for their region. Excessive resources may lead to competitive practices that can impact utilization and ultimately affect safety. Inadequate resources will result in delayed receipt of definitive care.
We further believe that:
- National guidelines for appropriate utilization of HEMS must be developed. These guidelines should be national in scope yet allow for local, regional, and state implementation.
- HEMS should remain a primary component in the National HEMS Agenda for the Future 2050 and should be further developed to address HEMS utilization and availability, and to identify and support a research strategy for ongoing, evidence-based refinement of utilization guidelines.
