Crew Resource Management in International Helicopter EMS Systems: A Look at the Differences in Air Medicine Outside the United States

Helicopter EMS (HEMS) is a critical tool in the safety net for medical emergencies around the world. It incorporates a team working in precise unison to both safely operate the aircraft and provide high quality and state of the art care to critically ill and injured patients. Crew Resource Management (CRM), the planning and implementation of allocating flight resources, has been recognized by the HEMS industry to be a critical factor in the safety of HEMS operations. There is no question that there is a risk associated with every flight and as studies have shown, the danger of an accident has not decreased but increased dramatically over the past ten years. The HEMS community is working diligently to surmount obstacles in the path of change to making HEMS operations safer while continuing the research and advancement of medical care. Change is on the horizon for HEMS and there is no better time than now to find and fix the flaws in our system. The leaders in the HEMS community are researching and investigating how and where these changes must be made, but their reviews and evaluations are being done exclusively here in the United States. In attempts to approach this issue at a different angle, a project was initiated at the University of Pittsburgh through the Center for Emergency Medicine of Western Pennsylvania (CEM) and the University of Pittsburgh Honors College (UHC). This project attempts to examine the variance in CRM methods employed by HEMS programs outside the United States, the efficacy of implementing those methods, and some of the best practices applied by these programs. By looking at the techniques, methods, and cultures of these services selected, we may expand our understanding of CRM and our own safety culture in Helicopter EMS to advance the industry to a new standard