When accidents and life-threatening injuries occur, time is of the essence between the scene and medical care. That’s when air transport staffed by trained medical professionals arrive and their care in the air makes a critical difference.
Flight nurses fulfill that crucial role, making sure patients reach the hospital safely and are stabilized on board. In-flight medical care is essentially trauma care in the air, and these highly trained professionals handle these emergencies in high-stress environments with limited resources.
Many flight nurses come from a military background, where their experience caring for the injured in war-torn battlefields prepares them for the situations they may face treating people in critical situations.
Others take to the air from traditional nursing schools or after time spent in hospitals. But like their counterparts in the ER, they perform the routine functions of preparing medical charts and background for the physicians who will treat them.
In the often jarring environment of in-flight care, most often in helicopters, flight nurses perform triage, emergency medical care and act as a calming influence to what can be a terrifying experience for their patients.
Their primary objective is to keep patients alive to arrive while also keeping a team on the ground aware of what to expect when the air ambulance arrives.
“I started as a clinical tech at the hospital straight out of college,” said Karen Thurmond, a chief flight nurse for Orlando Health in Florida in a 2012 interview for Orlando Magazine.
“And I saw the flight team and the critical care nurses, and I enjoyed the high adrenaline and the medical services aspect of what the flight team did. So I went to nursing school and made that my goal.’’
Thurmond spent the majority of her nursing career providing in-flight care and said her time was almost evenly divided between responding to trauma situations, such as car crashes, and caring for patients transferring from hospital to hospital.
“We have equipment to deal with any emergencies,” she told the magazine. “We have lifesaving interventions to get somebody breathing again, to get their heart started. We have an arsenal of medications for pain. Oftentimes, it’s just putting a pillow under their knees.
“We try to work with patients to find out what’s best for them.”