Writer

Amy Laboda

Eileen Frazer, executive director of the Commission on Accreditation of Medical Transport Systems (CAMTS), accepted the Airbus Helicopters Golden Hour Award at Heli-Expo 2016. Twenty-five years ago Frazer founded CAMTS, and she has led the organization, dedicated to improving the safety and quality of both air- and ground-based medical transportation, ever since.

 


In the mid-1980s, Frazer was an emergency room nurse who chaired the safety committee of what is now the Association of Air Medical Services. The committee drafted criteria for peer review safety audits that were designed to address a critical problem: the increase in air ambulance accidents.

 


Frazer and the committee felt the peer review audits should be performed by an independent organization. In 1988 and 1989, Frazer did a feasibility study, modeling an ideal audit organization on the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, which accredits hospitals. Frazer subjected the standards developed by the committee to an extensive public comment process and published them as CAMTS standards in 1991.

 


Today CAMTS is made up of 20 nonprofit organizations, each represented on the board of directors, and all of which are dedicated to improving the quality and safety of medical transport services. The accreditation standards address issues of patient care and safety in fixed- and rotary-wing services as well as ground inter-facility services that provide critical care transport. Each standard is supported by measurable criteria that can reasonably assess a program's quality.

 


Revisions to the standards over time are a direct reflection of the dynamic, changing environment of medical transport and, according to Frazer, are made only with considerable input from all disciplines of the medical air transport profession.

 


CAMTS offers a voluntary audit of compliance with its accreditation standards, but earning CAMTS accreditation isn’t an easy matter. A medical transport service must substantially comply with the standards of the organization before accreditation will be issued, according to Frazer. Services striving for accreditation can submit progress reports to CAMTS as their operations’ deficiencies (found during audit) are corrected.

 


With all of the challenges medical air transportation is up against today, accreditation helps organizations stand out as a seal of quality and safety. There are now 184 CAMTS-accredited air ambulance programs in the U.S. and six countries around the world, and that number is growing as CAMTS completes, on average, 75 new or reaccreditation applications every year.

News and issues regarding all manner of civil and military rotorcraft and their powerplants, including helicopters, tilt rotors and unmanned air vehicles.