NEW state-of the art Ambulance Victoria (AV) snow vehicles are looking to change the game of patient care on the slopes.

Three brand new Can-Am defenders and Skidoo vehicles specially designed for the Victorian High Country made a stop in Wangaratta in preparation to hit the slopes for snow season.

AV Hume area manager Rob Heaslip said the vehicles have been three years in the making, going through rigorous testing and design alterations to ensure they are best suited for snow resorts at Falls Creek, Mount Hotham and Mount Buller.

“Everything was too big to access patients in those resorts, so we had to make something new,” he said.

“It’s going to make a huge difference; we will be able access patients a lot quicker and transport them a lot more appropriately and monitor really critical patients while we’re getting them back to a medical centre or to an ambulance.

“It’s just a much more sophisticated way to treat patients, because everything that’s on the Can-Am is on a normal ambulance, it’s just more compact.”

One of each vehicle is being distributed to the three resorts, complementing the standard garage of ambulance vehicles.

Mr Heaslip said the Can-AM defender was a world-first design in ambulance care, which has already proven its functional value in elements outside of the snow.

“We’ve been developing them from a farm vehicle to what you see now,” he said.

“They are really unique and they’re really functional; we put wheels back on it and used it at the F1 Grand Prix this year for getting in and out of big crowds and our Gippsland comrades will use on some of the surf beach stuff as well.

“We designed it for snow, but with different uses over the state and because our research development centre is in Melbourne, other people saw it being developed and thought they could us it in other environments.”

Mr Heaslip said the design of the vehicles have been tailored to the snowy and hilly specific features of the local resorts, which have proven complex to navigate for standard ambulance transport in the past.

“It responds to a lot of manual handling challenges we had at different resorts as well as patient comfort,” he said.

“We actually used to tow a sled with a skidoo with a patient on the back, so if someone needed treatment along the way, then that’s too bad, but now we’ve got on board monitoring within the machine.

“We can now use the fire trails there in the summer and some of the bike trails to be able to access patients in wilderness areas.”

Mr Heaslip said in addition to a greater investment in snow vehicle car, Ambulance Victoria had also tripled its paramedic workforce at snow resorts during the season to improve response times and patient care.