Aviation Story #2: Care flight

As a nursing major, I'm going to apply this class to my major just a little and talk about flight nursing. I work in the emergency department as a nursing assistant right now and am doing my practicum clinical experience in an emergency department as well. Trauma, intensive care, or emergency nursing are my intended nursing specialties. I love being the first one in to assess and stabilize a patient. Someday, I hope to be as confident, wise, and nurturing as the experienced first responders that I've met working in my field. Okay okay, enough about nursing.. I could ramble about my passion all day long! Of the many nursing careers I've considered, care flight nursing has always intrigued me.

Care flight nursing, in my experience, is one of the most respected fields of nursing because it requires quick decision making, excellent assessment skills, and lots of accreditation/schooling. Care flight transfers are reserved for the most serious of car accidents or other injuries, when the patient's condition requires transfer by helicopter to the closest trauma center. A care flight team consists of specially-trained nurses, paramedics, emergency medical technicians, and a pilot. Unlike in the hospital, there is not typically a doctor on board the helicopter, meaning that the nurse is the head of the medical team and exercises much more autonomy than the average nurse. For this reason, the nurses hold licenses both as a registered nurse and as a paramedic and typically have at least 5 years of experience working in an ER or an ICU. The paramedic education provides the nurses with the skill set to do life saving measures such as intubation, a duty saved only for doctors in the hospital.

According to one care flight nurse I was recently able to interview at work, she has to hold certifications such as Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS), Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS), neonatal life support, and many others. In addition to being on call for day shifts, night shifts, weekends, and holidays, there are requirements that the nurses pick up a certain number of shifts per month on varied types of hospital nursing units, including a pediatric floor and different types of intensive care units, to keep their skills up. On top of all of these requirements, the nurses must maintain a healthy body weight and physical fitness level in order to keep up with the physical requirements of the job and fit into the helicopter with the team. Although she acknowledges that all of the requirements seem daunting at first, she said that it is one of the most rewarding and exciting jobs that she has ever had.

So what does this have to do with aviation? It just goes to show that even a seemingly unrelated field such as nursing has a direct tie to the invention of airplanes. Without advancements in aviation technology, the ability to transfer a critically injured patient to a trauma center to care for them within minutes would be impossible. Without the care that the teams on these helicopters provide, hundreds of survivors would not be with us today.