It’s 6:45 a.m. and the next flight team has arrived at the Lorain County Regional Airport.
Life Flight Medical Director, Dr. Craig Bates has been flying missions for six years. Today he’s working with Flight Nurse Specialist, Amy Armbruster.
The first thing they do is take a computer analysis test that checks their fatigue levels and determines if they’re fit to fly.
Meanwhile, the same procedures are taking place with the two other flight teams based at the Portage and Wayne county airports.
MetroHealth is no longer home base. The helicopters were moved to strategically cover Northeast Ohio.It means that they’re never more than than minutes away from getting Level One trauma care,” Dr. Bates says.
However, potential weather issues and unscheduled maintenance may ground one or more of the crews on any given day. There is a “spare” helicopter available if needed.
One would think practicing medicine in a medical helicopter would be an extremely stressful job, but you’d be wrong.
Dr. Bates says it’s quite the opposite because the focus is only on their patient and not on the extraneous distractions that can happen in MetroHealth’s busy emergency department.
“It’s exciting we all are a bit of adrenalin junkies and it keeps the job interesting,” Dr. Bates says.
While there’s not much room to move inside the EC-145 every high tech medical device is within reach of the medical team.
“Most of the stuff we can do in the first thirty minutes except for X-rays and CAT scans,” Dr. Bates says.
Metro’s LifeFlight is one of few programs in the country where a nurse, physician and two pilots are standard. However, on some flights, the physician may be replaced by a specially trained Nurse Practitioner.
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article courtesy of Wkyc.com
