In the field of providing Emergency Medical Services, time is an important factor. You need to reach the patient as soon as possible to give them immediate care and deliver them to the nearest hospital. A fraction of a second is very crucial and may also cost the patient's life. To cope with this, a series of improvements were done to provide a more efficient response to critical situations.

The ambulance was used before to only transport patients to hospitals. Today, the modern ambulances are equipped with high technology equipment so they could provide extensive care to the patient before bringing them to a near hospital. In some cases, transporting the patient to a nearby hospital is not necessary.

There are some places that are not accessible to the regular ambulance. These areas may be remote areas or places that can't be reached quickly by a regular ambulance. In these cases, it would be more convenient if we use an air ambulance. The air ambulance is an aircraft that is used for emergency medical assistance for much quicker response to areas where air transport is most available. Like the traditional ambulance, air ambulances have medical equipment like ECG, ventilators, medicine and stretchers. A group of medical personnel is also aboard the air ambulance.

The concept of air ambulance started with the military. They developed the idea of using an aircraft to literally carry the injured to their camp to be treated. The US started using helicopters as dedicated air ambulances during the Korean War in early 1950's. As time went by, the use of air ambulances started to developed by the military. They started using the fixed wing aircraft for long distance travel.

Air ambulance usage for civilians in earlier times were mostly incidental. They were often used in areas that were inaccessible for quite sometime or even the whole year round. In 1928, the first full-time air ambulance was introduced in the Australian outback. The organization was known as the Royal Flying Doctor Service and is still operating as of this time.

To be a pilot for an air ambulance, you must meet the requirements which are much higher than being a pilot on non-emergency flights. Flight experience is a very big advantage for aspiring pilots. This makes sure of the flight safety when carrying patients onboard. The accreditation is being done by professionals who are qualified to check for air ambulance safety.

For the medical crew, it will depend on which country or the purpose of the service company. For services operating under the Anglo-American model of service delivery, the helicopter is mostly preferred as transport , and their crew consists of Emergency Medical Technicians, Paramedics, flight nurses and sometimes physicians.

Some services that focus on critical care are mostly staffed by doctors and nurses. On services which operate on the Franco-German model, air ambulances are used to provide high-end support to ground-based EMS most of the time. Most of their crews are physicians, sometimes surgeons, trauma specialist, anesthetist, advance care paramedics and nurses. In these cases, the ground ambulance carries the patient not the aircraft.

Different organizations offer air ambulance services. Air ambulance service is also known as Aeromedical Evacuation or medevac. Here are the different types of air ambulance services. It can be military/civilian models, government-funded, fee-for-service, donated by a business group or may be funded by public donations. You also need to differentiate the types of aircraft used. It could be a rotary-wing, fixed-wing or very huge airplane.

There are so many things we know about air ambulance especially the benefits that we can get from it. We could also expect many advancements in air ambulance servicees in the near future<