Page 12 - Volume 14 Number 10

many types of medical emergencies and maladies. For those situations that require a little more attention, the two can phone the company’s 24-hour medical control or the receiving hospital’s doctors from a satellite phone.
To get the full feel of what a patient experiences, I became one. With my simulated broken leg from a car clipping me while on my bike, I was situated onto the sit-up medical cot facing the rear of the aircraft and buckled in. At that point, Campbell and Maravilla would have taken medical intervention had my condition been legitimate.
Perhaps surprising to many, about eight out of every 10 patients may be critically ill but are clinically not experiencing rapid changes in their condition during transport to a specialist (often orthopedic or cardiac- related). For the other remaining two, the medical crew’s jobs become more complex.
Many times, when the crew arrives on the
scene, they may be the most experienced
in emergency trauma care and actively
assist the other practitioners on actions in anticipation of transfer. For instance, the
night prior to our flight, the crew was in
Medicine Lodge to bring a trauma patient
to Wichita for acute care. The ground team
awaited LifeSave’s arrival for trauma center
care, so they were on-ground for more than an hour stabilizing the patient and preparing them for transport.
Even with the time spent on the ground, flying to Wichita was still a net time gain in the end. According to LifeSave, trips over 100 miles (of what would have been driven) almost always are better taken in the air. From that decision point, weather conditions and total distance dictate whether rotors or propellers prevail.
The return flight is only as eventful as the patient’s condition and fortunately my flight was as uneventful as it could be. After 23 minutes, we were back on the ground at Jabara and pulled up next to one of the company’s ground units where I got to experience the patient transfer process. At this stage (and onboarding), one of the King Air’s few weaknesses became apparent. The relatively small 28-inch cabin door can occasionally be an obstacle for the team to navigate, as the cot is a tight fit. After passing the threshold, I was put down the “slide” onto a cart and on my way to the company’s ground unit.
In some scenarios, such as transferring a critical patient in Denver where traffic slows an ambulance’s route, I was informed that the patient would be transferred from the fixed-wing asset to a rotor wing.
10 • KING AIR MAGAZINE
The flight nurse and paramedic who tend to the patient in the King Air cabin share medical knowledge and experi- ence that complement one another and allows them to handle many types of medical emergencies.
(Credit: Grant Boyd)
From there, the patient is airlifted directly to the care facility’s helipad. More often though, they are whizzed away in the ambulance.
No matter which way the company transports someone to tertiary care, the pilots, paramedics and nurses are happy to know that they are making a difference on likely the worst day of someone’s life. KA
Grant Boyd soloed at 17 in a 1977 Cessna 150M. In the seven years since, the private pilot has been involved in aviation through a variety of avenues: from marketing to customer service. He has written more than 85 articles for a number of aviation magazines and loves learning about aircraft/pilots with unique missions. Grant can be reached at grantboyd2015@gmail.com.
OCTOBER 2020