A presentation at an emergency medicine conference in Haifa shows that Israeli helicopter evacuations are better planned than those in US.
The conference took place at Rambam Hospital in Haifa, to where many casualties of Hizbullah rockets and other Lebanese attacks have been evacuated over the past 30 years. Dozens of emergency aid personnel took part in the conference, from Magen David Adom, the IDF, doctors, and medics.
Less than a Day in the Hospital
Avishai Wolf, operations director for the Lahak Company that carries out civilian helicopter evacuations in the north, explained to the participants that an important standard in determining the efficiency of helicopter evacuations is whether or not the patients’ injuries required more than a day of hospitalization.
In the U.S., Wolfe said, a high percentage of such patients remained in the hospital for less than 24 hours. Topping the charts in this regard was Arizona, where a full 43% were released within a day.
In Israel, however, 687 people were flown to hospitals with serious injuries in 2010 – and only 7% of them were released within 24 hours.
Wolfe explained that the Israeli evaluation of the patient’s condition and severity of his wounds is done more professionally than elsewhere, preventing wasteful and unnecessary helicopter evacuations when an ambulance can do the job just as well.
The international standard for measuring the gravity of a patient’s wounds is called the ISS index. A score of 15 or above justifies a helicopter evacuation, as is in fact the case in most Israeli evacuations – but in the U.S., 60% of the evacuees were under this score.
62% of Israeli helicopter evacuees were hurt in car crashes.
In the United States, 900 helicopters are in use for evacuations, in a $2.5 billion business of 400,000 evacuations each year.
Other topics discussed at the conference included the latest developments in identifying strokes, as well as futuristic treatment of wounded soldiers in the battlefield.