Dr Emmeline Finn
Winching aeromedical personnel into primary scenes to attend to critically injured or ill patients is risk taking and life threatening. The act of winching requires centralised clinical coordination particularly around risk vs benefit for these missions. Preparation requires expertise, precision and paramount safety from tasking to planning to executing to debriefing. A number of retrieval services across Australasia employ doctors, nurses and paramedics who are contracted to care for patients who are critically ill or injured in austere environments. Contemporary services are contracted to train and operationalise medical, nursing and paramedic clinicians to winch into a primary scene. This requires specialised training, competency and currency.
Standard operational procedures, winch registries and regulated clinical governance ensures that the process of winching aeromedical teams into primary settings is safe, necessary and aims to improve patient assessment, management and outcomes. Emmeline will provide an update on where we are at with winch operations for the aeromedical workforce in Australasia and discuss what patient cohort is suitable for winching and who should go down the wire.
Biography:
Emmeline is a Retrieval Mediicine Specialist who has worked across a number of state-wide services including LifeFlight, Ambulance Victoria and MedSTAR. Her interests include workforce education, training and safety as well as clinical governance of aeromedical systems. Today she will discuss the specialised skill of winching and what it takes to keep a procedure safe for workforce and patients. She will also consider who should winch.