We are interested in your feedback as a consumer (patient).
We are committed to continuous improvement. Using this quick and easy survey (the 'Friends and Family Test'), we can rapidly learn from your experience.
This helps us to understand what is working well and what can be improved. Thank you for making time to share your feedback with us.
If you would like to request patient information either for yourself or on behalf of a patient, please fill in the Patient Information Request Form here.
The team at the Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust, in a joint venture arrangement with the Northland Emergency Services Trust (NEST), are contracted by the National Ambulance Sector Office (NASO) to provide emergency air ambulance services of the highest standard to the people of New Zealand’s northern region.NASO is a joint office between the Ministry of Health and the Accident Compensation Corporation, who help fund our day-to-day operations. We are very grateful for NASO’s support.
We, in turn, support their commitment to ensuring all patients requiring air ambulance services receive the best possible care and that our community has full confidence we are committed to this goal as well.
We have a strong clinical governance focus on quality improvement. As a service we are actively involved in aeromedical sector clinical initiatives and new developments.
We have monthly clinical governance meetings where clinicians review and share organisational learnings from complex cases.
We carry out regular clinical audits, looking at the quality of care we are providing and monitor our practice against accepted clinical standards, international best practice and internationally derived clinical quality indicators. We submit (non-identifiable) data to the Ground and Aeromedical Transport Quality Improvement Initiative. This is an international resource for transport teams to track, report, and analyse their performance on transport-specific quality metrics by comparing it to other organisations.
Externally we are also involved in national ambulance sector groups including the National Air Desk Governance group, Ambulance Sector Patient Safety and National Aeromedical Clinical Governance.
We submit data to National Clinical Registries, including the National Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest Registry, the New Zealand Trauma Registry and the Australasian Emergency Airway Registry. These registries are registered with academic ethics committees
We take providing excellence in clinical care seriously. We have a process for identifying, investigating and learning from events where patient care is not of a standard that we would expect. Should we fall short of our goal for clinical excellence, we want you to know about any event that has resulted in either serious harm to, or the death of a patient whilst under our care.
This “Reportable Events” section is a requirement of our contract with NASO and it is updated on a quarterly basis.
We have a Clinical Safety Team who are given the responsibility of investigating patient events, and these may be driven by reporting by the crews themselves, via patient feedback or feedback from other service providers and also our own internal quality assurance processes.
Trust is very important in our line of work, and we believe honesty and transparency is vital to all stakeholders in our service, including keeping any patients or whānau involved in an adverse event informed of our progress and findings.
We sincerely hope that through awareness, we continue to challenge the way we do things, to learn and to grow.
We assign all adverse events a Severity Assessment Code (SAC) rating to determine
the severity of the event. Find out more about the SAC rating and triage tool on the HQSC website.
Quarter 4 2021-22 (Apr-Jun 2022)
No SAC 1 or 2 events reported
Quarter 3 2021-22 (Jan-Mar 2022)
No SAC 1 or 2 events reported
Quarter 2 2021-22 (Oct-Dec 2021)
No SAC 1 or 2 events reported
Quarter 1 2021-22 (Jul-Sep 2021)
No SAC 1 or 2 events reported
Quarter 4 2020-21 (Apr-Jun 2021)
No SAC 1 or 2 events reported
Quarter 3 2020-21 (Jan-Mar 2021)
No SAC 1 or 2 events reported
Quarter 2 2020-21 (Oct-Dec 2020)
No SAC 1 or 2 events reported
Quarter 1 2020-21 (Jul-Sep 2020)
No SAC 1 or 2 events reported
Quarter 4 2019-20 (Apr-Jun 2020)
No SAC 1 or 2 events reported
Quarter 3 2019-20 (Jan-Mar 2020)
No SAC 1 or 2 events reported
Quarter 2 2019-20 (Oct-Dec 2019)
1 SAC 1 event investigated and reclassified as a SAC 3
Quarter 1 2019-20 (Jul-Sep 2019)
No SAC 1 or 2 events reported
