Air Medical Safety Survey

[DMcCracken]

I am collecting data about attitudes toward education and safety in the Air Medical Industry.

 

If you have experience in this industry, I would appreciate you contributing your thoughts.

 

All information collected will remain confidential.

 

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=BUha...kAiT_2fJg_3d_3d

 

Thank you.

 

Darcy McCracken RN BN

[SkidKid]

Good luck with that.

 

I took your survey. Unanswered questions indicate my ill feeling for the rather pedestrian method of questioning.

 

Please, you might benefit from taking a statistics course and learning how to do a proper sample, pretest questioning, and please resist the urge to provide leading questions/responses.

 

Safety in this industry will be best served when medical types get out of the aviation sphere. There is a reason for Operational Control, addressed in A08 of any opspecs. Notice it does not list one single non-pilot. The problem is that many medicals feel the need to put their .02 in on everything. Real control freaks. Having pilots canned for any and all perceived slights and imagined safety concerns generates undue influence on decision making. Medical companies that think they run operations are usually characterized by communcations centers (inaccurately called "dispatch") and the like, circumvent the FARs and create a climate where fear of job loss that outweighs the fear of dying. Amazing isn't it?

 

Seriously I am not trying to get too down on you, it is just that I have just seen this before. I hope you get published, or what ever you are seeking, but I see very little possiblity of improving safety through "coaching calls", whatever that may be. The NTSB just completed a rather large series of hearings, and virually nothing has changed.

Edited November 3, 2009 by SkidKid

[delorean]

I took it too......didn't like it.

 

It seems like the purpose of the survey is to sell a two day safety course. If you multiple questions show you "strongly agree" or "agree" that a education is important, then statistic show you should go to this out of state safety course you're selling.

 

I sit through several safety courses (pilot & mechanic) every year and they're always the SAME info.

 

Safety departments, the FAA, etc are not the ones improving safety or causing crashes. Safety happens or doesn't happen out on the flightline.

 

Every operator has safety departments to say they have a "safety department". Every operator sends these guys to "safety summits" and courses so they can tell their insurance companies, CAMTS, the FAA, etc that they're promoting safety. Very, very little of these meeting shows up out on the line.

 

More than half of the crap I get from our safety dept is "Halloween Safety", "Fall precautions / preventions", and other BS stuff copied and pasted from OSHA website.

 

Fact of the matter is........

 

Until the FAA becomes an advocate for the HEMS industry and airmen, we're not going anywhere. Rather than combing through our logbooks searching for a comma out of place, making sure my compass correction card isn't faded, and that our bathroom scale is calibrated, the FAA inspectors should sit down and ask, "How can we make things safer," and "How do you guys mitigate the risk in XYZ situation." Then use and pass that info along as INFO, and NOT law.

 

I know three crewmembers in our company that would still be alive if they had NVGs on. But we had 70+ google sets and 10+ NVG cockpit kits that sat in a cabinet for over 18 months because the FAA suspended and was "re-evaluating" the STC. Then it took them another year to approve the company training program.

 

 

You'll be able to get people to your course/seminar, but it's just going to be warm bodies wearing their respective company shirts entering an appearance. Not much will make it out to the line where it counts.

[Gomer Pylot]

I've been attending safety meetings and courses for more than 40 years, and I've never been in one that was worth my time. It's all eyewash, and obvious eyewash. Every organization has a culture, mostly influenced from the top down, and it's not easily changed. If the members of the organization are rewarded for being safe, and are never questioned for making decisions that increase safety, the culture will tend toward safety. Any questioning of any decision will have a huge negative influence, and what took years to build can be destroyed in an instant. Safety meetings, seminars, classes, etc do nothing positive, other than provide job security for a few people.