Helicopter operators in the South are now directly employing flight medics after St John chose not to renew existing contracts.
The change took effect from Monday.
Helicopter Emergency Medical Services (HEMS) NZ Ltd chief executive Ken Franklin, of Millers Flat, said previously, there were two dedicated operators in the South Island, GCH Aviation in Christchurch and Helicopters Otago, based at Taieri, which used St John crews, contracted fulltime.
St John Southland and Otago district operations manager Pauline Buchanan said St John requested feedback from its air ambulance service partners early last year on a proposal not to renew existing contracts to supply intensive care paramedics to rescue helicopter providers from this October, when the current contract was due to expire.
"The decision follows consideration for how the flight medic role has become increasingly specialised, while each organisation operates differing roster systems and fatigue management requirements along with varying processes, equipment, and governance," Ms Buchanan said.
Mr Franklin said subsequently both GCH and HeliOtago were now providing the "complete contingent" of clinical crew for the aircraft — that totalled about 20 for HeliOtago from a total of about 50 in the South Island — under the HEMS umbrella, which holds the contract for air ambulance service provision in the South.
The operators employed the medics — a mix of paramedics, intensive care paramedics (ICP) and critical care paramedics (CCP) — directly.
"It is a cost to business, but the cost to the businesses was, effectively, whether we were buying those services directly ourselves, or buying them via St John, the same cost exists," he said.
"It was always at the discretion of St John ... but they gave plenty of notice and they’ve worked incredibly collaboratively with us to ensure the change went well.
"From our perspective, we are very pleased to have our own crew on board, but that doesn’t mean to say we had any problems with the previous model either, we had a strong working relationship with St John.
"They’ve got a fairly massive organisation that they’ve got to deal with, and we didn’t really investigate too heavily the reasons for the change, but we were happy to work with them to enable it to occur."
