Whether that should have been used in the cases described in the attached article is a reasonable debate. I'm more confident in the people on the ground making this choice than the news reporter.
Medical practitioners, however, cannot send someone in a cab. It's a huge liability issue for them. If someone is injured and needs medical transport, they need to use proper medical transport. This is what Tesla is accused of violating. Their on-site nurses are licensed medical professionals. It's worlds different from random person taking a cab to a hospital.
State law regulates drivers, medical transport is a subsection and medical transport is further broken down into emergency transportation and non-emergency transportation. What the law says is you can’t just start offering medical transportation services to the public in exchange for money without complying with the law/regulations.
Further, as you might imagine doctors are regulated, and if you are treating a patient who needs to be transported to an ER for emergency services, the doctor should understand a Lyft/Uber isn’t the appropriate standard of care and is per se illegal under those facts. The doctor may have had his/her heart in the right place be not calling an abmbulance to reserve that for a hypothetical life/death patient, but it’s hard to argue this isn’t an emergency when your a doctor sending your patient to the ER, at which point emergency medical transportation laws/regulations apply.
My wife drive me by nothing stopped me from using a taxi or ride share.
Doctors definitely have a duty of care that must consider emergency transport, but it's be surprised if laws explicitly stated you need to call an ambulance for stable patients that need emergency treatment.
However, the medical practitioner themselves cannot tell you to take an Uber to the hospital. Which is sensible.
I gp is rarely going to be in a situation where they need to call an ambulance for a patient; generally it's going to be the organization (like a nursing home) or management/administrator to avoid potential liability
Tell that to the California Department of Heath Care Services...and the 49 other states who have similar regulations and regulatory agencies in place.
Lyft/Uber giving rides to people in no way means or suggests those rides are legal. And there is a differnce between non-emergency transportation and emergency transportation...but it is all highly regulated. Still doctors and drivers should both know these laws that affect them directly. If a doctor is dumb enough to put an employee with a workplace injury in a rideshare, the onus is on the driver to deny the ride and tell the rider they are licensed/insured to take a patient to the ER and they should call 911...that doesn’t happen because ride share drivers are not professional drivers who actually know the laws that regulate them.
They should not be used for emergency transport, and that is part of the argument. Again, that is worthy of debate, but blanket statements about Lyft not being usable for "medical transport" aren't really useful.
Pretty sure my comment you replied to acknowledges there is a difference between emergency and non-emergency transportation.
If you want to argue how a worker with a crushed hand/severed fingers going to the Emergency Room for emergency medical treatment isn’t an emergency...go nuts, and please feel free to be liberal with the case Law you cite.
>And there is a differnce between non-emergency transportation and emergency transportation...but it is all highly regulated.
Nevertheless, I am right. Even to provide non-emergency medical transportation you must be registered (hold appropriate licenses/insurance), a random ride-share driver can not legally offer non-emergency medical services...unless they are registered with the government to provide those services.
Still none of them can provide emergency transport services to the public for money. So now you can continue debating that a patient with a crushed hand/severed fingers diagnosed by their doctor as needing emergency treatment in an ER is not an emergency requiring emergency transport under the law.
Please can you link to the law that you're talking about?