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air ambulance
ambulance services
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COVID-19: experiences of roadside logistics from a UK air ambulance service

02 July 2020
Features
02 July 2020
Volume 12 · Issue 7

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is so widespread that any patient in the prehospital environment is considered a significant transmission risk. UK charity air ambulances are affected by challenges regarding air equipment decontamination, staff redeployment and acquisition of personal protective equipment. This has led services to change their mode of operation and contribute to other areas of healthcare that have sprung up in response to the pandemic. Implementing adapted processes and assuming a clear clinical approach can help prevent transmission and uphold service integrity.

COVID-19 is short for coronavirus disease 2019, which causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The virus found to cause the illness is structurally similar to other SARS-causing coronaviruses, and was therefore named SARS-CoV-2 (Tang et al, 2020a).

The viral pandemic originated in China's Wuhan region at the end of 2019 (Sohrabi et al, 2020) and was declared a global health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO) (2020) a month later. It was another 3 weeks before Public Health England (PHE) (2020a) released its first novel coronavirus-specific guidance for ambulance services; this has since been adapted numerous times, as knowledge increases and evidence emerges.

The outbreak has been established as having such a sustained spread in the UK that any patient encounter (within 2 metres) requires a degree of personal protective equipment (PPE) (PHE, 2020a). High demand and low supply of PPE, along with helicopter emergency medical services (HEMS) staff being redeployed to frontline ambulance services have left some air ambulance services with a lack of PPE and some having to ground helicopters (Yorkshire Air Ambulance, 2020).

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COVID-19
Helicopter emergency medical services (HEMS)
Personal protective equipment (PPE)
Aerosol-generating procedures (AGP)
Teamwork