AIR AMBULANCES

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIII, Issue 77, 13 March 1933, Page 10

AIR AMBULANCES

A MODERN DEVELOPMENT USE BY RED CROSS SOCIETIES. CIVIL AIRLINES CO-OPERATE Fifty years ago when a patient was taken to hospital by ambulance it was in a waggon drawn by two horses and marked with a red cross. He suffered all the jolting, and delay, and inconvenience that was unavoidable in horse ■ transport. Since then, the increase in speed and comfort of conveyance has been widely utilised for the improvement of ambulance services. Trains and ships have served in the past and still serve for the transport of the sick, and to-day the motor car is the commonest and in most cases the most practical means of conveying patients to hospital. When aerial transport emerged from the stage of experiment and became a common and safe means of conveyance, it was natural that its possibiLHcs for quick and efficient ambulance service should be considered by the Red Cross. It offered certain decided advantages over other ambulance servitt—viz., speed and stability. In Inost cases the chief obstacle to its wider development was cost. Aeroplanes are expensive to buy and to run; they need a trained personnel and special landing grounds.

National societies have adopted different systems to meet differing local conditions. There are three main tvpes of peacetime aerial ambulance service. The first is in use in Sweden where the Red Cross possesses its own material and personnel and operates its own aeroplanes. The sick are collected by aeroplane and taken t 0 a central hospital which is usually in the same town as the air base. This kind of ambulance service is specially suited to a sparsely populated country such as the north of Scandinavia and parts of South America, Australia, and Siam, where distances are great and normal means of transport, if not lacking altogether, are slow, painful, and expensive.

The second system employed by the Fred Cross in some countries is to make arrangements with the military or civil authorities to use their material in ease of need, and this method is followed in Spain, Italy, and some of the French colonies as well as by the American Red Cross, particularly on the occurrence of disasters. It has the advantage of giving a military air force the chance of rendering practical service in peacetime. It has. on the other hand, the disadvantage that military machines may not. always be available for the work of the Red Cross Society. In certain cases a combination of the first and second method has been used and the Red Cross has bought a certain number of machines which have been down by military pilots. Under the third system, the Red Cross works in conjunction with a civil air line and uses ordinary civil machines which can be easily trans, formed to carry stretchers. As ordinary civil machines operate between the larger cities between which aerial transport of the sick is not necessary, there must be enough emergency landing grounds on their routes for them to serve country districts. For example, in the north of Norway arrangements have been made with a civil air line so that the sick can be transported on request for the same price as it would ;ost by other means. The Norwegian lied Cross is making au experimental contribution of 6,000 Norwegian crowns to the air line for 1933. The choice between these three systems will depend on local circumstances, but from the international point of view the use of existing civil air lines seems to have the greatest future and to offer the easiest method of transport across national frontiers. During the meeting of the Board of Governors of the League of Red Cross Societies held in Paris in November, 1932, the secretariat of the League organised a demonstration at Lc Bourget air-port. It was shown how a civil aeroplane could have a special opening through which a stretcher could be passed after the seats inside had beeu removed. The demonstration showed that practical difficulties had been overcome. The more difficult question is always that of financing peacetime services and at the same time maintaining the general principle of free help to those needing it. Each national society using such a service has this problem to solve—either by the use of Government subsidies, or by funds from official or private sources. The problem is not iusoluble and before many years we may expect to take aerial Red Cross ambulance services as much for granted as motor services.