Why There’s An Increasing Demand For Non-Emergency Medical Transportation
According to studies, the population in the US will double in the period between 2000 and 2033. This rapid population increase will mean that there will be 21% increase in the number of senior citizens in that time, a number that should be taken into account if we are to be prepared to give them the medical care they need. This of course, includes better and more efficient ways of getting them over to the doctor’s appointment through non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) and other mediums of transport for delicate patients.
Senior citizens with health problems can have a difficult time getting from point A to point B, considering that taxi and public transport services are in high demand and can be hard to get. This is one of the reasons we should not only be aware of the benefits of non-emergency medical transportation , but to start encouraging our older relatives to use it.
What is non-emergency medical transportation?
It is a service designed to provide safe and reliable transportation for people with health issues in non-emergency situation. This can mean getting them to an appointment at the health center and back, arriving on time for studies and check-ups and the sort.
These rides are equipped with whatever’s necessary to give patients medical care through the trip. Driven by health professionals like critical care nurses and paramedics, this service is ideal for the elderly who need to be taken care of at all times.
Challenges for non-emergency medical transportation
As the population increases in all corners of the world, reliable and well-prepared medical transportations are becoming more and more a necessity rather than an exception. Patients too elderly or sick to drive themselves will be increasingly dependent on this type of service.
This also has to do with the fact that we all have less and less time left in our schedule to drive our parents to the doctor, and we need a safe service that can be trusted 100%. In this vein, parents who are at work and need to send their children to the doctor can also benefit from non-emergency medical transportation, for health and also for safety reasons.
Also, with the medical advances being discovered almost daily, increasing attention to detail in the caring of sick people will render taxis and other mediums of transport ineffective for this kind of patient.
Specialization is the norm
As we dive into the XXI century, you can expect that services will become more and more specialized in a specific area to provide a higher quality product for a specific ideal client. Decades ago, if a non-emergency patient needed to go somewhere, taxis and public transport would have been his or her only options. Even patients who needed long distance emergency travel would have had to hop on a regular commercial flight or an ambulance.
In this era, taxis and buses will not work for delicate patients. We are now more and more aware of how much attention to detail is necessary to provide proper health care, and this includes transportation too. We need professionals doing the work that’s meant for them, the kind that they were trained to do. We need to allocate the correct human and technological resources where they are necessary and non-emergency medical transportation is one of those places.