Response to: Best practice advice on pre-hospital emergency anaesthesia & advanced airway management

The European HEMS and Air ambulance Committee’s Medical working group recently published Best Practice advice on pre-hospital emergency anaesthesia and advanced airway management. We believe that this initiative is important. In our opinion however, the competence requirements recommended by the authors do not meet the standards that we should aim for in HEMS services. We argue that pre-hospital emergency anaesthesia should be delivered with a competence level approximating in-hospital standard. In our experience, our patients benefit from pre-hospital emergency anaesthesia delivered by consultants with regular in-hospital rotations and a sound clinical governance system.