STAT MedEvac personnel have busy workdays

STEUBENVILLE — STAT MedEvac’s new base at the Jefferson County Air Park operates with a three-person flight crew on 24-hour duty.

Jami Craig, a flight nurse with the air ambulance provider, told members of the Steubenville Kiwanis Club Tuesday afternoon a bit about the life of a crew with a STAT helicopter.

The crews are assigned to a base and work rotating 24-hour shifts. Each crew includes a pilot, a flight nurse and a paramedic, and each crew works two 24-hour shifts a week.

The day begins with the crew reporting for work and meeting with the crew coming off shift. Then, the crew coming on duty heads out to the helicopter, usually a Eurocopter EC-135 at the Jefferson County base, and checks all the equipment on board.

Craig said a 20-to-25-minute daily briefing is then conducted by the crew’s pilot.

“It’s the same briefing every day, the only thing that changes is the weather,” Craig said. “It’s all the little reminders. Running a helicopter can be dangerous, it’s important to have us stay on our toes.”

A mechanic makes a daily check of the helicopter’s systems, she said.

The helicopter from Wintersville can fly 160 mph with a range of 353 nautical miles, according to the company’s Web site.

The 18 aircraft flown by STAT MedEvac are fully equipped for instrument flight, meaning they can be flown in a variety of weather conditions, she said.

Craig said the STAT MedEvac base in Jefferson County joins another in Grove City, Pa., as recent additions. A base at New Philadelphia was closed, with operations assumed by MedFlight of Ohio, she said.

The EC-135s cost about $5 million each, she said, and are the smaller of two styles of Eurocopters flown by STAT MedEvac.

“We can land just about anywhere,” she said, so long as the landing area is at least 60-by-60 feet and has no overhead wires in the area.

The helicopters are each capable of handling two patients at a time, but because of limited space, STAT generally responds multiple helicopters when multiple transports are needed from one scene or hospital.

Inside the chopper, Craig and her counterparts have a space to work in that’s about 4-feet-by-4-feet, including monitors and equipment, the patient and a co-worker. Pilots are not medics and concentrate on flying the helicopter.

STAT’s helicopters all load patients through clamshell doors at the rear of the cabin. The helicopter crews will perform “hot loads,” with the engine running and the rotors turning while a patient is loaded.

“This saves us as much as nine minutes by not having to restart the helicopter,” Craig said. “We save time, and time saves lives.”

STAT’s helicopters will transport patients from one hospital to another when the patient is in need of a higher level of care, or directly from an accident scene to a hospital.

Once at the destination hospital, the chopper is left running as the medical crew offloads the patient, delivers a report to hospital personnel and then returns to service.

STAT MedEvac’s main dispatch center, resembling a cross between an air traffic control center and an emergency dispatching center in a photo displayed in Craig’s presentation, is on the roof of UPMC-Presbyterian in Pittsburgh.

“They know where each helicopter is, who is on board, how much fuel is on board,” she said.



(Giannamore can be contacted at pgiannamore@heraldstaronline.com.)