The Journal of air medical transport
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Patients flown on air medical aircraft are separated from family and other concerned parties, often for several hours and many miles. This paper studies the usefulness and safety of offering transport to these passengers on air medical aircraft. A nine-item questionnaire was mailed to 95 program directors. ⋯ From these responses it was concluded that more than half of all helicopter programs can carry a patient's family, but do so only 5% of the time. All fixed-wing programs can carry family of patients and do so from 35% to 95% of the time. Various benefits and disadvantages were discovered, analyzed, and discussed.