Every so often the ACT Liberal spokesman on emergency services Gary Humphries comes out with a ritual cry that Canberra should have a full-time emergency helicopter. He usually hangs his call upon some instant emergency involving injury or threat to life. He was at it against last week with the release of the year’s road toll figures, conjuring up images of an ACT helicopter beating out to remote regional roads plucking up injured ACT residents and whisking them back to the safety of Woden Valley Hospital.
The idea has a certain instant appeal. Helicopters can be visualised as quick and effective. Injured people get better treatment earlier because they get to hospital quicker and because helicopters can carry doctors. It has a superficial financial appeal because people treated earlier spend less time in hospital.
However, helicopters are expensive to buy and expensive to run. A bottom-end helicopter would cost at least $1 million and a further $600,000 a year to run. It would probably not do the job well. The ACT would more likely be looking at $5 million to $10 million. The money has to come from somewhere _ usually somewhere else in the same budgetary area. It means other emergency, rescue and health services would have to be cut. It might mean that on balance more people got delayed treatment because of service cuts to support a helicopter than got expedited treatment because the helicopter were in service.
Even if there were a groundswell of community support resulting in donations and corporate sponsorship it would mean fewer donations and corporate sponsorships for other things.
Every now and then someone gets injured or killed in remote, inaccessible parts of the ACT or adjacent NSW _ particularly the Brindabellas and Kosciusko National Park. Invariably these incidents are used as evidence that a Canberra-based helicopter is needed. In fact, they often show the contrary. Usually, a Sydney-based or other helicopter gets to the scene within two hours of the time that a Canberra-based one would have got there. Or ground-based rescue proves adequate. The events by their relative rarity and by the way they are met with other means illustrate that a Canberra-based dedicated rescue helicopter cannot yet be justified. Sydney helicopters are used about five or six times a year in the region. True, a Canberra-based helicopter would be used more often and could be contracted out to regional NSW, but that does not alter the fundamental question of misallocation of resources from the unseen routine to the eye-catchingly dramatic.
At the end of 1993 the chair of the ACT emergency management group, Glen Gaskill, summarised the position: “”At the end of the day it’s what is the level of risk compared to what we can afford, and it just does not seem to be worth it.” Little has changed in the ensuing year to change the soundness of that opinion.