Nontrauma helicopter emergency medical services transport: annotated review of selected outcomes-related literature

Abstract

While helicopter emergency medical services (HEMS) has its roots in military transport of wounded soldiers, rotor-wing transport is also used for a wide variety of nontrauma indications. Despite this common use of HEMS for noninjured patients, a Medline search found little systematic review of the literature pertinent to HEMS use for nontrauma. With HEMS utilization subject to appropriately increased scrutiny, those seeking to research HEMS utility in noninjured patients could benefit from existence of a collection of the topical literature. This paper aims to provide such a review, in the form of an annotated bibliography of Index Medicus journal studies assessing potential medical risks and benefits of HEMS transport for noninjured patients. The paper's goal is to provide a useful resource for those interested in pursuing more focused review of various sectors of the nontrauma HEMS literature. As such, the main objective of the article summaries is to provide a brief outline of study design and results; there is also limited editorial comment included after each summary.