Russia to set up regional HEMS
Work is underway to establish air ambulance operators in Russian provinces, reports Vladislav Vorotnikov.
Work is underway to establish air ambulance operators in Russian provinces, reports Vladislav Vorotnikov
Kurgan Regional Center for Disaster Medicine opened a competitive bidding procedure for establishment of a single regional air ambulance operator in Ural Federal District, Russia, according to the information from the website of the regional government posted on 20 June.
The preferred bidder will operate the service from 1 August till 31 December 2017, performing approximately 125 flight hours during this period on a light utility helicopter with a ferry range of 450 km, the bid instruction indicated.
According to the Kurgan government, the air ambulance provider will be allowed choose the model of helicopter and hire pilots itself. It will be required, however, to install medical modules on the helicopter with a certain set of equipment, to handle mission calls in an hour during summer time and in two hours during winter time, as well as to transport patients from the place of accidents in the city area to the nearest hospitals within 15 minutes.
The newly established operator should provide air medical service in four regions in the Ural Federal District, including Kurgan, Tyumen, Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk Oblasts. The helicopter should be based near Shadrinsky Emergency Hospital in the city of Kurgan, where a helicopter pad will be built shortly within the separate competitive contract.
“This is the first time that an air ambulance provider is being established in Kurgan Oblast. The project is implemented within the framework of the Healthcare System Development Programme in the region for the period until 2020, which has been recently complemented with the subprogramme for development of medical aviation,” a Kurgan government representative said.
The contract value is Rub114.4 million, out of which 10.41 per cent will be paid by the regional budget; the remaining 89.59 per cent will come from the federal budget within the governmental programme for setting up air medical services in Russian provinces adopted in the beginning of 2017, according to the competitive bidding documentation.
Federal programme to gain momentum
Medical aviation in Russian provinces will be taken to a new level in the near future, the country’s Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets said on 10 June in a speech at the Forum for Social Innovations in the Provinces, referring to the recently adopted federal programme, which stipulated Kurgan Oblast is only one of a number of regions where air ambulance services should be set up.
The comprehensive federal programme, which was originally designed by Health Ministry, envisages air medical service should be formed in 34 Russian remote provinces during the period from 2017 to 2019, whilst the federal budget took on an obligation to allocate Rub9.9 billion for this purpose, including Rub3.3 billion during 2017.
The list of remote provinces primarily comprises regions in Russia’s Far East and Siberia, but also some regions in the European section of the country, where the transport infrastructure is poorly developed.
The federal budget should cover on average 87 per cent of all spending for the creation of an air ambulance operator in each Russian province, and the largest subsidy of some Rub404 million in 2017 will be granted to Sakha Republic, also known as Yakutia, the country’s largest region with a total area of more than 3 million square kilometres.