3 killed in Kentucky medical helicopter crash

ffemt8978

ffemt8978

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Bummer. Been seeing the crash remembrances all over FB.
 
Hitting guy wires during they day time is a pretty unusual event.
 
“The patient is doing well”..

Another unnecessary flight claims the lives of 3..
 
Bethany was a recent hire, she started a few months after me, was super excited and a fun person to work with. The others I knew from training or being at hospital at the same time. But they were seasoned old timers.

During my orientation, they kept saying it had been 10 years since an event and statistically they are overdue based on number of missions flown. Then AEL cashed in Oklahoma, and now in KY. I quit recently, and relocated to Yuma, AZ.

Sucks all around, however I have a very long rant about the service and the industry in general. Might work on that post just to share firsthand insight and maybe have a little cathartic release.
 
akflightmedic said:
Bethany was a recent hire, she started a few months after me, was super excited and a fun person to work with. The others I knew from training or being at hospital at the same time. But they were seasoned old timers.

During my orientation, they kept saying it had been 10 years since an event and statistically they are overdue based on number of missions flown. Then AEL cashed in Oklahoma, and now in KY. I quit recently, and relocated to Yuma, AZ.

Sucks all around, however I have a very long rant about the service and the industry in general. Might work on that post just to share firsthand insight and maybe have a little cathartic release.
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I have been really struggling with going back to flight. Next June I'll finally have 3 years as an RN and can apply again as a flight RN (the local company bends over backwards to accommodate RN's, including schedule and base assignment).. I really want to fly again, but I remember how pointless most of it is..
 
That’s the sad part of it all. The majority of flight industry is profit driven. I am not against any business seeking profit, however it became harder and harder for me to justify each flight I was going on, especially when it was painfully obvious it was by no means a “true” medevac. It’s a lot of risk for little actual return.

Example: I flew a patient from a small hospital who had been admitted for two days, nSTEMI and was on a heparin drip. Stable vitals. Needed a ride to Louisville for cardiology and a Cath.

For some reason he had to go at 0200. Most likely provider convenience. The local ambulance service could not ground pound (which was common) for various reasons. Reasons usually were “no medic on duty” (true), only one medic on duty and need to stay in town, or call volume too high right now to send 1 of our 2 ambulances out of town for 2+ hours.

It’s not EMS fault obviously. But then the responsibility falls on the flight crew. And then a couple times, when we couldn’t fly, guess who took a ride in the ambulance as a gesture of company goodwill to the community (cause we didn’t bill for this). So now I am in back with an EMT yahoo driving who often is just as tired as we were, yet no one ever says “no”. (We declined flights, just saying the ambo option was never a no).

And as a prior businessman, I totally appreciate and respect the massive marketing the company does, I love the market competition, but even if I was a decision maker I am certain I would do many things differently, safer, and still have respectable profit margins. It’s a case of enough not being enough by those who benefit the most.
 
Even if you end up doing ground critical care transport as an RN, you will find yourself doing a lot of very basic "monitor" or single drip calls because either the facility/insurance wants the RN to do the transport or there's no medic available that can do those calls. Where I'm at, there are several EMS systems in my service area where the vast majority of medics work for the 911 system only so the only mostly available IFT ground transport options are BLS or CCT. I used to work in an area where Fire was the ONLY ground transport option and they did ALL the ground transport including 911. If they were unavailable for IFT because they needed to have a certain number of units available for 911, then the next best option was 2 hours away and sometimes even that wasn't available. When that wasn't available, then the only option was a flight. If the patient was stable enough to stay overnight, they did.
 
Akulahawk said:
If the patient was stable enough to stay overnight, they did.
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Wish this was true everywhere. My previous job served a CAH that was 45 minutes from a real hospital. We did 7-800 transfers a year out 4000 total calls. Many of these happened in bad weather, at night, or when our resource levels were low simply because the facility did not want the patient to "spend too long in the ED." Transferring someone for a neuro workup at 0200, crap like that. They just wanted them out to "maintain our stores." Unfortunately transfers were a good source of revenue, so we took the unnecessary risk often. Eventually we were able to hold them for a bit, so they would just call flight. Lame.
 
I initially thought scud running but it looks like weather was CAVU. My area lost a medical helo back in the late 80s scud running and had that" gottagethome" attitude. Blade just nicked the edge of the tower. Tower stayed up, helo not so much.
Kobe Bryant died in a scudrunning crash. Houston crash was another CAVU but still struck the tower
One thing I learned was towers cannot be seen during the day. Steer WAY wide of them. My home base had a Navy radio station not far, and those towers were not far from the pattern. At night I found towers to be a friendly helping hand for navigation, but scary during the day. WATCH YOUR SECTIONAL!
 
Sorry to hear about this. RIP to the crew and I hope that their families and friends can soon find peace.

These at least seem to have become much less common than they were in the early-mid 2000's, when HEMS bases were proliferating like crazy all over the country and crashes seemed like such a regular occurrence that they were almost unremarkable at times. It seems that the industry has sorted itself out fairly well in that regards, at least judging by the frequency with which I hear about HEMS incidents now.

The industry still has a lot of work to do in terms of enforcing much more appropriate utilization. I predicted long ago that that problem would improve due to a combination of actions by insurers, consumer advocacy groups, class action lawsuits, regulatory scrutiny, and the newfound enthusiasm in EMS for evidence-based guidelines. Clearly I was very wrong, and as long as insurers are paying for unnecessary flights they will continue.
 
Carlos Danger said:
The industry still has a lot of work to do in terms of enforcing much more appropriate utilization. I predicted long ago that that problem would improve due to a combination of actions by insurers, consumer advocacy groups, class action lawsuits, regulatory scrutiny, and the newfound enthusiasm in EMS for evidence-based guidelines. Clearly I was very wrong, and as long as insurers are paying for unnecessary flights they will continue.
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Colorado passed additional legislation to add surprise billing protections for patients getting emergency care (to include air medical) and we all thought that would cut unnecessary utilization down. That was not the case, as you said the insurers still seem to be paying all these transports. We seem to have slowed down on creating new HEMS/fixed bases at least.
 
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