Web-based media for landing zone safety instruction.

Helicopter emergency medical service (HEMS) missions provide vital transport of critically ill patients. Heightened awareness of HEMS safety has resulted from an escalating number of crashes, increasing from 1.7 per 100,000 flight hours in 1996 to 1997 to 4.8 per 100,000 flight hours in 2003 to 2004.1 One estimate puts crewmember risk of fatal crash over a 20-year career at 37%.2 The need for safety instruction can be categorized into crew safety and ground personnel safety training. Industry standards dictate that, at minimum, crewmembers must complete safety training yearly.3 This training includes identifying appropriate landing zones and communication with ground emergency medical services (EMS) personnel.4 However, participation in an 8-hour refresher course has not demonstrated long-term knowledge retention.5 An alternate method of instruction using streaming online media proved superior in this regard.6 No particular regulations exist with respect to ground personnel training, though this is a crucial aspect for a successful mission.7 Knowledge of landing zone safety can assist in preventing delays in transport and reduce unnecessary exposure to the inherent dangers of HEMS.8 Few studies have investigated the frequency or means of landing zone safety instruction to EMS and firefighters. Organizing a community outreach lecture series at various locations in an air medical transport service area is complicated, and capturing all fire and EMS personnel at one time is nearly impossible. Using streaming media as a teaching medium has been successful in medical education over the past decade. Both live and prerecorded presentations have been shown to be easily accessible using a computer with internet connectivity.9 Compressed audio and video allow for a virtual classroom that is readily available at the viewer’s convenience and allows for cost containment.10 A natural extension of this phenomenon is the use of podcasted lectures, a method that circumvents problems in the audio/video quality of streaming media by downloading the lecture file.11 An informal survey of our flight service area indicated that many firefighters and EMS personnel had not received landing zone safety training in the preceding 2 to 3 years despite frequent on-site training events offered by our program. This gap in education led to the development of our research study. The goals of our study were to: assess baseline landing zone safety knowledge of surrounding firefighters and EMS personnel, provide helicopter landing zone safety training in an easily accessible format, and assess the educational efficacy of an on-line landing zone safety video. Our research hypothesis is that on-line landing zone training will be an effective method of increasing community EMS and firefighters’ knowledge of landing zone safety.