Olive View – Critical Care Transportation Team

About the Program

Category: Health (Best in Category)

Year: 2021

Critical Care Transport(CCT) is the movement of critically ill patients who require higher level of care from one medical facility to another while maintaining advanced level of care during transport. Like many other hospitals in the country, Olive View-UCLA Medical Center(OVMC) lacks certain specialty services and require transfer to the tertiary hospitals. After immediate stabilization, the patients often wait for transportation to the other facility. Due to limited numbers of available specialized CCT teams in the community, the time of arrival for the CCT crew varied significantly, often waiting up to 20 hours. This is a major challenge that we needed to address when a patient needs emergency lifesaving procedure and could not afford to wait for the next transport crew. OVMC leadership collaborated with other LA County agencies to develop a program that could help expedite these emergency transportations. OVMC coordinated with EMS and LAFD to put together its own team. Utilizing existing resources, the team consist of highly skilled RNs, RTs, and physicians working collaboratively with abundant BLS units. OVMC CCT was launched on October 1st, 2018. This innovative program was successful in its efforts to improve transport pick up time from average 6-8 hours to 33.2 minutes.