Jim Cummings
Now that the newness of the constant presence of a LifeLine helicopter flying over the city has worn off, the real amazement factor comes from learning what goes on inside.
Monday, flight medic Bill Summerfield attended the weekly Rotary meeting to share his experiences on saving lives at 150 miles per hour.
“We have much of the same equipment on board you’d find at a hospital trauma center,” Summerfield said. “We treat, not just transport, patients with significant blood loss, penetrating wounds to the head and neck, multiple fractures, heart attack victims and people who’ve overdosed or been poisoned.”
LifeLine's other Indiana helicopters are based at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, Howard Regional Health System in Kokomo and Hulman Air Field in Terre Haute. On each air transport, the LifeLine team is comprised of a pilot, flight nurse, medic or a flight physician. It is the only air medical transport team in Indiana to have this type of medical expertise on each flight.
“We make a good partnership,” Summerfield said. “We have some of the strictest hiring requirements in the industry. Our pilots come in with at least 2,500 hours of flight time and the dispatchers join us only after spending two years or more as a paramedic.”
Summerfield has been a paramedic for more than 20 years and has been on the flight crews for three. He just arrived in Greensburg Sunday and has already been on one medical run.
“Decatur County Memorial Hospital has been awesome to us,” he said. “Any request we’ve made, they’ve accommodated. They’ve bent over backwards to pamper and take care of us.”
The addition of Greensburg to the LifeLine base of operations has undoubtedly made Decatur County a safer place to live.
“It used to take us a half-hour to get here, Connersville, Rushville or Richmond,” Summerfield said. “Now we can make it in less than 10 minutes. That makes a huge difference. I think with us having quicker access to the outlying areas and getting patients to a tertiary care facility that much faster will definitely save lives.”
LifeLine was the first hospital-based helicopter program in Indiana and serves the entire state and parts of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Illinois. LifeLine has been serving the citizens of Indiana and beyond for nearly 26 years and in July 2004 flew its 25,000th accident free patient transport.
