# Commanility of Stretchers for Helicopter Service?



## MMiz (Dec 29, 2007)

I can remember driving about 20 minutes north of our usual service area, to an area serviced by three other private EMS services, in order to pick up a LifeFlight/helicopter patient that needed transport from the LZ to the hospital only a block or two away.

We got the call because we were the only service with Stryker cots/fasteners in all of our units.  The helicopter loaded their fully loaded and tricked out Stryker cot into the back of our tiny Type II BLS ambulance.  

Have any services that uses Ferno cots faced problems with working with air ambulance services?


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## Jon (Jan 1, 2008)

First - the Ferno and Stryker cots use similar mounting brackets, and they are interchangeable with minimal adjustment.

Around here, there was one service that used to use Stryker stretchers. They now are mostly flying EC135's and are using a special-made roll-in stretcher. The rest of the services have to carry their stretchers to and from the bird.


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## Flight-LP (Jan 2, 2008)

I have never had an issue working on either end. I am used to "flats" that just lay flat in the helicopter and we would just load that onto another stretcher when we needed to move (or get FD to carry it). But I would think it would be more logistical feasible to just move the patient onto the other stretcher instead of causing a mounting conflict. Or even worse a safety issue. Just scoot them over onto the EMS unit stretcher..................


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## Grady_emt (Jan 2, 2008)

When I used to work at AMR when I first started we had Ferno Stretchers and mounts.  After a few months they switched to Stryker stretchers but they left the Ferno mounts in hte trucks.  We never really had many problems with them, but I'm not sure if they had to adjust them when they switched out.  Both the Ferno and Strykers were the X frame type.


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## JJR512 (Jan 2, 2008)

The commercial ambulance company I work for uses newer Strykers, and older and newer Fernos. I don't know what mounts they use, but I've seen all three kinds of stretchers they use go in and out of the same ambulances with no problems and no changes made to the mounts. I've swapped them myself.


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## emtbuff (Jan 2, 2008)

Our area we have 3 choppers that come in.  2 of them have a backboard like device they hook into there chopper and we just place it on our cot.  The other one has there own cot that they take out.  We usually just take our cot out of the ambulance and lower it to the ground and put there cot in the ambulance.  Unfortunately it does not lock in but we wedge it in there well that it doesn't move.  We have to transport all pts from the hospital across the street to the chopper pad.  So we do quite a few chopper transfers.


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## Grady_emt (Jan 2, 2008)

Is Commanility a word :unsure::unsure::unsure:

And most of the chopper folk around here use the metal "skid plate" type stretchers.  And all but one of the hospitals have pads on property.


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## MMiz (Jan 3, 2008)

Grady_emt said:


> Is Commanility a word :unsure::unsure::unsure:
> 
> And most of the chopper folk around here use the metal "skid plate" type stretchers.  And all but one of the hospitals have pads on property.


Please don't tell my Language Arts students.  I clearly did not revise before I published!  Darn Opera browser!


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