I didnt do a whole lot with them being that within city limits you can just as easily get a Bus on scene and to an ER before They would even be wheels up and on scene thinking about setting down not to mention their arent too many places Id want to try and park a Dauphin. Only place where you really had a long drive to get to a hospital was on the Northern side of the city just because of the road layouts and all the hospitals being on the South side. I have a buddy in an outlying city and works as a paramedic though and he honstly cant stand what those guys seem to do. Seems like they are just way to happy to roll on stuff during "buisness hours" but call for them at night and they somehow manage to miss the group of 5 cars with blinking red and blue lights on the side of a highway and end up getting beaten to the scene by the Ambulance which didnt have much of a head start in distance. Some of the departments out here are "interesting" at best, hell the FD guys are a joke. City my folks live in has had 4 houses completely burn to the ground all of them were within 500 yards of a station, one was across the street.
Id honestly have killed to have had half the goodies and toys at our disposal you just mentioned. Hell we were happy when we had enough Patrol rifles to outfit all the cars I dont think you could ever sell the tax payers on how useful night vision would be to have. Apparently people dont realize that while bright as hell 3 guys looking for somebody in the dark with maglights in a blacked out industrial park doesnt work too well.
Well, part of the point of having Medevac helicopters is to get the patients to the best facility, not neccesarily the nearest one. In Maryland, where trauma care started, they have Maryland State Trooper helicopters that do primarily medevac (I think it is something like 95% of their missions). It works very well because of the the number of helicopters and the network of hospitals that have trauma care centers (some specialize in certain types of trauma care: one does burns, another specializes in children etc., and some are just general trauma centers). A helicoper is often the only sure way to get someone to a trauma center in the 'golden hour'. It works in Maryland partly because the small size of the state but mainly because of the massive investment in the entire trauma care system, from the helos to the hospitals.
In many other places air ambulances are not part of a larger trauma care system. As far as I know, the VA state police are the only other state that has helos primarily for Medevac and that feed into a large trauma care system. While many private air ambulance companies are probably very good they are still a businesses and have to make money to survive, and sometimes wht makes the most medical sense is not always profitable route to take. Many of the crews are willing to do the right thing, I don't think ChuckMk23 would leave someone hanging, but a big company might.
So if you don't have the investment in the complete system then you might not be getting the value out of the aviation assets, which may be the case in your city/locality.
