Air Ambulance Victoria (AAV)

The Metropolitan Ambulance Service provides emergency aeromedical care statewide for all Victorians. 

Through a coordinated system designed to individually match services with patient needs our air wing ensures location is not a problem when it comes to receiving medical care .

The air ambulance workload is very diverse and includes not only primary emergency response, but also inter-hospital transfers from and to rural hospitals.

We operate three emergency helicopters. These are based in Essendon, Bendigo and the Latrobe Valley. Their primary focus is responding to emergency calls, providing early MICA care at the scene of an accident and rapid transport of critical patients to major hospitals.

Four aeroplanes are based at the Air Ambulance headquarters in Essendon and they are used primarily for patient transfers between rural and metropolitan hospitals.

Through the flight coordination centre we can match the appropriate service to the request and provide maximum coverage. It is not unusual to have an air ambulance helicopter assist an injured skier in northern Victoria and then winch a MICA paramedic onto a ship in Bass Strait to attend a sick or injured sailor.

All helicopters are staffedby MICA flight paramedics while either a MICA flight paramedic or ambulance flight paramedic works on the aeroplanes, depending on the level of clinical care required. All paramedics working on aircraft undertake advanced trainingfor their roles.

We also coordinate statewide medical retrieval programs such as the Newborn Emergency Transport Service (NETS), Paediatric Emergency Transport Service (PETS) and the statewide Adult Retrieval Victoria(ARV) service. These specialist patient retrieval services incorporate the use of additional medical teams from major metropolitan hospitals. In addition ARV provides expert clinical care to hospitals by phone, coordinates access to critical care beds across the state and is responsible for retrieval of adult time critical and critically ill patients

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