Nicklaus Children’s Hospital’s LifeFlight® critical care transport program has achieved full three-year accreditation status from the Commission on Accreditation of Medical Transport systems (CAMTS). LifeFlight is the only pediatric/neonatal team in Florida to achieve this standing.
CAMTS offers a program of voluntary evaluation of compliance with accreditation standards demonstrating the ability to deliver service of a specific quality. Accreditation standards address issues of patient care and safety in fixed and rotary-wing services as well as ground inter-facility services providing critical care transports. Each standard is supported by measurable criteria to measure a program’s level of quality.
“CAMTS accreditation is the gold standard for transport teams internationally,” said Jose Perdomo, Interim President and Chief Operating Officer for Nicklaus Children’s Hospital. “We are enormously proud of our LifeFlight transport team and the essential work that they do in connecting critically ill patients with needed medical care.”
LifeFlight provides specialized advanced life support and critical care patient transport by ground and air ambulance 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The service safely transports more than 4,000 patients annually within a service area that includes South Florida, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. LifeFlight is an interfacility transport service transporting patients to intensive care units, emergency departments and medical surgical units.
The LifeFlight fleet includes six ground ambulances that are specially equipped to provide critical care or advanced life-saving support for patients, a hospital-owned Sikorsky® S76 C+ helicopter, operated by PHI Air Medical, which is equipped to care for any acuity level patient of any age and a Fixed-wing jets contracted on demand for long-distance transports. Nicklaus Children’s Hospital is not a direct air carrier. Aircraft, both helicopters and fixed wing, are operated pursuant to contract with Nicklaus Children's by companies that are FAA certificated.
About Nicklaus Children's Hospital, Where Your Child Matters Most ™ (2025)
For 75 years, Nicklaus Children's has stood as a beacon of hope for children and families across the state of Florida and beyond. Nicklaus Children's Hospital is South Florida's #1 nonprofit, freestanding specialty licensed hospital exclusively for children serving close to 70 percent of children in the Miami metropolitan community. In addition, Nicklaus Children's offers care within NCH North Hospital in Naples, Jupiter Medical Center's De George Pediatric Unit and select Baptist Health Hospital pediatric emergency units. The hospital and its network of more of nearly 35 outpatient care locations offer lifesaving care in in Miami-Dade, Broward, Martin, and Palm Beach counties. These outpatient locations include an array of urgent care, pediatric primary care, and subspecialty care centers and are either hospital-based or outpatient locations under Nicklaus Children's Pediatric Specialists, LLC (NCPS). Providing a pipeline of future physicians and groundbreaking research, Nicklaus Children's is an academic and clinical affiliate of Florida International University Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine. Nicklaus Children's is home to centers of excellence including the Helen & Jacob Shaham Cancer & Blood Disorders Institute, the Nicklaus Children's Orthopedics, Sports Health and Spine Institute, Nicklaus Children's Neuroscience Institute and Nicklaus Children's Heart Institute. The 325-bed hospital is renowned for excellence in all aspects of pediatric medicine, with many programs routinely ranked among the nation's best by U.S. News & World Report since 2008. Nicklaus Children's also includes a nonprofit physician practice subsidiary with over 40 specialties, and an ambulatory surgery center.