Trying To Improve Medevac Safety

Medevac staff has done a great job. It is so sad that some politicians, like Del. Michael Smigiel, R-36 (the upper eastern shore) have tried to kill our independent life-saving MEDEVAC helicopter program so as to put money into the pockets of his profit-making friends. Thank God that the rest of the legislature did not agree with Smigiel.

If you live in a rural area, you have no real alternatives to save your life if you are in an accident. The only chance you have for life is a MEDEVAC helicopter. I know: a family member of mile would have died, seriously injured in a rural are of the Eastern Shore, unless she had a helicopter transport to Shock Trauma in Baltimore.
So to hell with Del. Michael Smigiel who would kill my family member to deprive her of MEDEVAC transport to save her live. So, Smigiel, would you make her bleed to death because she could not pay $10,000 up front for a private helicopter service? SHAME ON YOU, Smigiel!

Maryland's State Police operated MEDEVAC program is the leader in the nation and is studied all over as the pioneer and still the best public emergency medical evacuation program. The politicians who tried to dismantle the system, including the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services that oversees the MEDEVAC program, were like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Yes, MEDEVAC needed better equipment, some better training and management decisions and accountability. All of those suggestions for reform were readily accepted by MIEMS and its medical overseers.
All that Smigiel and Sens. Pipkin and Astle wanted to do was destroy the system and turn it over to the private sector, with no real accountability to the public, taxpayers or the world famous Shock Trauma medical professionals who created the system.
Any of us who do EMS work will remember these misguided politicians in 2010 and we will speak out against them time and time again.

AMEN! Maryland's MEDEVAC system rocks! Thanks, State Police, paramedics and nurses who risk their own lives to save others.

Yes, indeed, Maryland's Medevac program "rocks." But to keep the program "rocking," we need to make sure that all state politicians support the system and the hard working EMS staff, State Police, paramedics, nurses, and University of Maryland Shock-Trauma hospital supervisors are kept on board.
We can't go to sleep just because Smigiel didn't win this year in his attempt to kill the State Police operated system. He will be back again trying to kill this independent non political program-- unless all of us in the EMS/State Police/ local fire companies communities stand together and work against this disgusting politician!!!