Believe it or not: There are flying ambulances on the Central Coast.
For the past eight years, California Shock/Trauma Air Rescue (CALSTAR) has been operating an air ambulance service out of the Santa Maria Airport. The company uses fully equipped medical helicopters and one fixed-wing airplane to treat and transport critically ill, injured, and pediatric patients throughout most of California.
“We only take the sickest of the sick and the most injured of the injured,” chief flight nurse Lisa Abeloe told the Sun in a recent interview at CALSTAR’s Santa Maria office.
Patients include severely injured hang gliders and motorcyclists, as well as rural residents with critical health conditions.
“We’ve also transported organ transplant recipients who need to be at the hospital within a very small window of time,” she said.
Because of the vast range of patients treated—“tiny infants all the way up to adults,” according to Abeloe—flight nurses must be trained to handle all sorts of traumas.
“They have to be able to take care of anything at any time. … Our goal is to offer seamless care from the time we’re on the scene to the time we get to the hospital,” she said, adding that her nurses have access to all the equipment one would find in an emergency room, but in miniature form.
All of the company’s nurses also have to be registered nurses with additional critical care and flight nurse certification. But even with all that special training, the nurses have to stay on their toes.
“Every day, every call is different,” flight nurse Rob Cooks said. “No matter how good you think you are, or how much experience you have, there are always going to be unique challenges and care for each individual patient.”
And when the nurses aren’t out patrolling the skies and saving lives, they’re picking up shifts at local hospitals. Cooks, for example, works in the emergency room at French Hospital in San Luis Obispo.
Like flight nurses, CALSTAR pilots have to have special training, too.
“We fly just like the commercial airlines do,” pilot Jeff Goodhue said, which means CALSTAR pilots can use Instrument Flight Rules to fly in low visibility conditions, such as marine layer, fog, wind, and rain.
Along with flying the helicopters, pilots are responsible for checking weather patterns, locating injured patients, communicating with air traffic control officials, and more.
“Most injured people don’t have cell phones on them with GPS coordinates, so we talk to the fire department, medics—whoever’s the authority on scene—to get the information we need,” Goodhue said. “We tend to use clearly defined landmarks to search the road for patients, like motorcyclists.”
And when the sun goes down, the crew uses night vision goggles to search for people.
“We can see so well from them, it’s amazing,” Abeloe said.
These tools enable the nurses to do their jobs and do them well.
“I think the best service we provide is onsite critical care with [immediate] transport,” Abeloe said, citing a 911 call her crew responded to a few years back.
“A man had gone into cardiac arrest at one of the lakes. His wife started CPR, and we were able to get him to the hospital in 10 minutes. If we hadn’t have been there, it takes about 45 minutes to drive to the hospital, and I don’t know if he would have been able to survive that,” Abeloe said.
A certified nonprofit, CALSTAR provides care and services to residents and tourists throughout San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties, transporting them to facilities as far away as Stanford or Long Beach. The crews also fly frequently into Monterey, Kern, and Ventura counties to provide backup to local authorities.
The company doesn’t charge counties for its services, and people aren’t charged unless they are transported.
“Sometimes we volunteer time to help search for missing people, like if a family is camping and one of their children wanders off, or sometimes dementia patients will go visiting,” Abeloe explained.
“Once we were able to find a vehicle that had gone over the side of the freeway into a canyon. It turns out the person had been there for a couple of days,” she added. “It’s so great that we’re able to be there and to help people.”
Contact News Editor Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 1-8, 2010.