Association of Air medical services
Congratulations to the following award recipients, honored at the 2004 Air Medical Transport Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio. The 2004 Annual Community Awards presentation took place on October 25. The competition was especially exciting this year, and the tight races resulted in dual award winners in a few of our categories below.
The Transport Mechanic's Award of Excellence recognizes an individual who has made significant contributions to the safe operation of medical transport vehicles or the improvement of safe maintenance procedures of medical transport vehicles. Jeff Becker of Mayo Medical Transport in Rochester, Minn, is one of this year's recipients. Jeff has worked as an aircraft mechanic for 16 years and joined the staff of Mayo Medical Transport in 1995, where he serves as safety manager. As chair of the Mayo One Safety Committee, he is instrumental in keeping the crew informed on a variety of safety issues, both aircraft- and hospital-related, and played a key role in instituting Mayo One's online computerized debriefing system.
The second recipient is James Baird, lead mechanic for St. Mary's Medical Center LifeFlight in Evansville, Ind. James joined LifeFlight 6 years ago and has served as the lead mechanic since November 2001. As the sole mechanic for the program's Bell 407, he has maintained an average aircraft availability rate of 95%. When the medical crew determined that the placement of a new monitoring unit wasn't convenient to both the flight nurse and flight medic, James designed, fabricated, and installed a new mount that exceeded all expectations. The mount he developed has been copied and distributed to other Bell 407 bases within Air Methods Corp, LifeFlight's contract EMS provider.
The Barbara A. Hess Award recognizes an individual who has significantly contributed to the enhancement, development, or promotion of the air medical community through research or educational efforts. This year's winner, Michael Day, is the outreach educator/clinical nurse specialist for Northwest MedStar in Spokane, Wash. In this position, he teaches the majority of helicopter safety classes. Last year, more than 1500 EMS and hospital personnel heard his message on helicopter safety and landing zones. Through his outreach efforts, Michael discovered that EMS providers in rural areas were eager to provide more accurate latitudes and longitudes so that GPS systems would enable EMS personnel to access precise landing information, but the equipment was too expensive to be covered by small budgets. Michael began scouting funding for the equipment. His first request to a local hospital foundation netted him $2000, which he used to purchase 20 GPS units. A second grant for $16,500 funded an additional 150 GPS devices. MedStar recently learned that they will receive $14,500 from the Washington State Department of Health to purchase more units for rural agencies that still lack the devices.
The Jim Charlson Award recognizes an individual who has made significant contributions to the overall enhancement, development, or promotion of aviation and aviation safety within the air medical transport community. This year's award goes to Dr. Ira Blumen of UCAN at the University of Chicago Hospitals. He is one of the few physicians in HEMS that is both a program director and a medical director. He is a founding member and past president of the Air Medical Physician Association. Ira is unique in being one of the few physicians who have become leaders in the safety realm. He created “A Safety Review and Risk Assessment in Air Medical Transport,” a 69-page document developed in collaboration with the UCAN Safety Committee. This is the most comprehensive safety-related document in the air medical community and includes a literature review and a research model to estimate and project exposure data for the industry. He compared the HEMS accident and fatality rates with those of other forms of air travel. The document concludes with a discussion of how to enhance safety and reduce risk in air medical transport.
The Medical Crew Member of the Year Award recognizes an individual who has made significant contributions to enhance the development or promote the improvement of patient care in the air medical transport community. This year's recipient is Elaine Philipson of Survival Flight in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She has been instrumental in developing the program's safety culture, organizing educational training for staff members who were infrequent crewmembers on specialty transport teams. This training consisted of a comprehensive PowerPoint presentation and rotations for staff in the neonatal, ECMO, respiratory, obstetrical, and transplant units. These rotations are repeated during each unit's yearly review and safety orientations. Elaine created a system so user-friendly that now, several years later, the specialty teams within the hospital call yearly to set up their orientation times well ahead of schedule.
The Marriott-Carlson Award recognizes an individual who has made significant contributions to the overall enhancement, development, leadership, or promotion of the air medical transport community and has been actively involved or participated in an air medical transport organization. We have two winners in this category for 2004. The first award goes to Boyd I. Mitchell of Erlanger Life Force in Nashville, Tenn. The words, “The weather's green/green. Call me early, call me often,” are familiar to anyone who has had the privilege of working with “Captain” Mitchell. After retiring from the military, he began flying as a corporate pilot and then in 1986 began his career as an EMS pilot with Vanderbilt LifeFlight. In 1991 he joined Erlanger LifeForce and has served the organization as a line pilot, chief pilot, and director of operations. He has provided many training, safety, and outreach classes. He's an exceptional pilot, a “smooth stick” who makes his entire crew feel comfortable. A consistent theme in Boyd's life has been service to others. He served his country for 21 years, and he has served the public for almost 20 more.
The second award goes to Rollie Parish, a full-time flight nurse with Northwest MedStar who created and maintains www.flightweb.com. Flight Web is viewed by many as the site for air medical and critical care transport information. Since going live in 1995, Flight Web has had more than 2.5 million hits. The amount of information available on the Web site is impressive, and Rollie spends a minimum of 20 hours each week maintaining the site—without compensation. At the request of management, Rollie took on another project: creating a Web-based issue tracking system as part of Northwest MedStar's quality management program. The database will provide a common reporting-resolution tool for any issue. It will include information on postmission debriefing and customer compliments and concerns and also will have an anonymous safety issue reporting system.
The Critical Care Ground Award of Excellence recognizes an individual or team who has made an outstanding contribution in a dedicated critical care ground program in any of the following areas: enhancing safety, education, leadership, or patient advocacy by developing or promoting improvement of patient care in the medical transport community. There are two winners in this category for 2004.
The Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center Neonatal/Pediatric Transport Team operates two mobile intensive care units and completes over 1400 missions annually. This transport team has more than 20 years of pediatric transport experience. Their equipment has been designed specifically for the intensive care support of children, not adapted to fit them. Each team member receives extensive training in the critical care environment and is fully certified. In 2004, the transport team established a safety committee to improve the safety of its members, patients, and their families. One of its first tasks has been to begin performing a job safety analysis for each team position that involves identifying the tasks associated with each position, determining the potential hazards and risks inherent to those tasks, and finding ways to minimize or eliminate those risks. The team also has created or revised policies governing seat belt and cell phone use, hazardous weather, stopping at accident scenes, and disaster management.
VitaLink–New Hanover Regional EMS provides high-quality critical care transport to seven counties in southeastern North Carolina. The program recently developed a comprehensive safety policy that includes minimum hiring requirements, background checks, psychological examinations, and safety equipment and education standards. VitaLink frequently conducts lengthy transports that put crews at risk for fatigue-related accidents. In an effort to address this danger, staff researched professional organizations, regulatory agencies, and existing legislation to determine safe driving time for drivers. The team consulted with their organization's risk management and legal departments to come up with the driver duty-time policy: without exception, crews are taken off the road at their maximum drive time.
The Program of the Year Award recognizes an air medical program that has demonstrated a superior level of patient care, management prowess, quality leadership through visionary and innovative approaches, customer service, safety consciousness, marketing ingenuity, community service, and commitment to the medical community as a whole. This year's award goes to Boston MedFlight in Boston, Mass. Since 1985, Boston MedFlight has provided more than 25,000 patient transports and expected to transport more than 3000 patients in 2004 alone. The program is CAMTS-accredited and offers rotor wing, fixed wing, and critical care ground transport.
Boston MedFlight strives to maintain the highest clinical standards using a competency-based orientation program and offers clinical rotations and simulator training. It also places community education as a high priority, believing that accident prevention is an important part of their service mission.
The program has been accident free since its inception nearly 20 years ago, partly because of a deeply ingrained safety culture that mandates that pilots and crew members receive extensive safety training.
Fiscal responsibility is important to all organizations, even nonprofits, and Boston MedFlight has undertaken a number of unique measures to improve its financial position, including owning its assets and in-house billing.
This program recognizes that there is always room for improvement and so has implemented a number of process improvement efforts. The program employs a performance improvement coordinator, and every transport is reviewed by two medical directors and a pediatric medical director. All crewmembers, including pilots and administrative staff, conducts annual process improvement projects that review procedures from a scientific perspective. All medical crewmembers perform clinical rotations at consortium hospitals as part of their competency-based education requirements, and the team makes significant contributions to medical transport research and literature.
Barbara J. Pasztor received the AAMS Program Director of the Year Award, sponsored by Bell Helicopter Textron Inc., for her exceptional leadership of Life Flight at St. Vincent Medical Center & Medical College Hospital in Toledo, Ohio.
Air & surface transport nurses association
The Katz-Mason Award recognizes the exceptional leadership of an individual who has had a positive impact on flight transport nursing on a global scale. This year's recipient is Richard McKinstry, RN, the education coordinator for Louisville Medical Center STATCARE in Louisville, Ky. Rick received this award for his commitment to educate flight nurses and flight paramedics. He participated in the education of more than 6000 people and more than 200 class offerings in 2003. Aureus International sponsored this year's award.
The Jordan Award is given to an individual who has made a significant contribution to transport medical journalism. This year's recipient is Sherri Dean, RN, of Children's Mercy Critical Care Transport in Kansas City, Mo. Sherri has published numerous articles for ASTNA, has been involved as both an author and reviewer in ASTNA's Standards for Critical Care Specialty Fixed-Wing Transport, Flight Nursing Core Curriculum, and Core Curriculum Companion Workbook. She was also a contributing author to the Department of Transportation's Guidelines for Air Medical Crew Education and served as editor of Surviving Neonatal Resuscitation by Scott De Boer. Metro Aviation Inc., sponsored this year's award.
The Ground Transport Award recognizes an individual who has shown exceptional leadership and has had a positive impact on ground transport nursing on a broad scale. The 2004 recipient is Kevin M. Wall, RN. Kevin was instrumental in the development of the Kids Care Pediatric Critical Care Ground Transport System for Huntsville Hospital, serving as the manager of this team since its inception in October 2002. With his experience and performance as a transport nurse since 1999, he was approached to consider a position creating a pediatric transport system to serve northern Alabama and southern Tennessee. The program has been a huge success providing PICU- and pediatric emergency department-level care in transfers from outside hospitals.
The Certified Flight Registered Nurse Award is given by the Board of Certification for Emergency Nursing to a nurse who currently holds the CFRN credential, has demonstrated motivation that encourages peers to attain certification in flight nursing, is knowledgeable regarding issues related to certification, demonstrates the ability to articulate the professional aspects of certification in flight nursing, and functions as a role model by obtaining and maintaining the CFRN credential. The 2004 recipient is Judy Kettenstock, RN, CFRN, program director and chief flight nurse with Midwest Medflight in Ypsilanti, Mich. As program director, Judy encourages her staff to take the CFRN examination because she knows that this is an excellent way for them to achieve personal growth, and it is also a good marketing tool to promote Medflight's reputation for giving the best patient care.
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