A landmark in intensive care transport

When transporting patients with combined cardiac and pulmonary failure, the emergency services frequently face a dilemma: on the one hand, transporting such high risk patients is hazardous because of their extremely critical condition, while on the other hand, this is frequently unavoidable because the wide range of therapeutic possibilities that can be needed to treat these patients are not available at all hospitals. It is the often the case that only specialist centres can provide the required facilities, and as a rule, these can be quite a distance away. Experts suggest that such transport will necessarily become more frequent in future, as the changes to the hospital landscape in Germany will result in a general reduction of hospital capacities and an increasing specialisation of the remaining institutions. For these high risk patients with cardiopulmonary failure, this could mean that there will only be a specific number of clinics able to deal with them.