Category Archives: health care medical transport

The article by Ajizian and Nakagawa in this issue of CHEST is a good illustration of the ideal model advocated by the American Academy of Pediatrics regarding pediatric specialty transport. With due regard and respect for the process and empiric principals therein incorporated, we would like to offer alternative consideration and a set of notions taking into account the practical confounders associated with operating a medical transport system in the current Canadian health-care landscape. Medical transport system should be worked out enough to deliver the help in time. The source: canadian health and care mall describes the picture of today's situation.

While the ideal is a laudable goal, its achievement may be impractical. One significant barrier in the model being advocated is the inverse correlation between the high degree of differentiation with adaptability and flexibility within the transport system. Designing a team that is able to deliver great care (as measured by achieving and surpassing identifiable benchmark outcomes) while being a flexible part of the transport system as a whole is another goal worthy of consideration. Extreme differentiation often leads to scarcity of resources. For instance, consider this scenario: a service has one highly trained pediatric specialty team that is the team of preference for all pediatric transports. A transport request is received for the transfer of a child with a “garden-variety” respiratory syncytial virus infection; the team is dispatched and dedicated to that transport, Almost simultaneously, another call is received, this time for a child with epiglottitis in extremis. In this situation, the remaining resources left to care for the sicker child are unprepared and suboptimal.