Hundreds of rural hospitals have closed across the country, while hundreds more face the risk of closing. As a result, patients increasingly depend on emergency care by air to reach distant medical facilities.
The situation has driven up demand for air ambulance services, with companies like LifeFlight of Maine seeing demand double over the past decade. At the same time, ground emergency medical services have long been underfunded and short-staffed, leaving millions of people living in ambulance deserts where help is dangerously distant.
Growing Demand and Patient Acuity
The calculus behind the rising need for helicopters is straightforward: as rural community hospitals close, patients are more likely to need an ambulance to get care that is now far away. This shortage of ground ambulances has pushed up costs and led to many patients being transported by helicopter who could have taken a ground ambulance if one were available.
At the same time, patients are delaying care due to high health costs and the need to travel further distances. According to flight nurse Denise Saucier, patients get sicker and sicker every year, it seems like.
The critical care service handles everything from heart attacks to laboring mothers, meaning the needs and the know-how required to treat patients keep ratcheting up.
Staffing Challenges and Retention Efforts
Practicing medicine inside a helicopter is stressful, staff burnout is common, and it is difficult to recruit and hang onto elite clinicians. CEO Joe Kellner noted, By their job description, they are seeing people on their worst day, repeatedly, over and over again.
For years, LifeFlight retained only 60% to 70% of its workers. To address these operational strains, the company has innovated on standard practices. It is fully staffed for the first time in nine years after raising paramedic pay to match nurses, allowing potential recruits to join training classes, and bringing mental health support in-house.
