The COEfficient The COEfficient - Capital Health

IN THE COMMUNITY
Stollery’s PICU celebrates 10 Years
The sky’s the
limit for this Elite
Transport Team
RN Joanna Byers sits beside the transport sled in the plane with
flight paramedic David Hole behind the monitor.
ozens of pairs of
winter boots are
lined up and ready
to be laced for a
mad dash, even in
the heat of Alberta’s
dry summer.
They belong to an elite
group of specially trained
physicians, nurses and respiratory
therapists who make up the Stollery
Children’s Hospital’s Pediatric Intensive
Care Unit (PICU) transport team.
This team provides specialized care
of severely ill children during hospitalto-hospital
transfers and transports by
ambulance, helicopter and airplane.
The team can be mobilized for a trip
as far as the Arctic in just 20 minutes.
This month, the PICU transport team
celebrates its 10th anniversary.
“In 1996, the first formally trained
PICU transport team in Alberta was
launched,” says the group’s Medical
Director Dr. Allan de Caen. “We found
that there were children in hospitals
within Edmonton and surrounding
rural communities who were critically
ill and needed not only definitive care
from Pediatrics within Edmonton, but
needed to be transported to us without
deteriorating en route. For this
reason, a specialized PICU transport
team was developed.”
A decade later, the team is now considered
one of the busiest in Canada
and serves the largest geographic area,
stretching from parts of eastern B.C.
and the Yukon, across the central
Arctic, and extending down into
eastern Saskatchewan and southern
Alberta as necessary. The team can
bring the resources of the Stollery
Children’s Hospital’s Pediatric Intensive
Care Unit to the patient’s bedside.
“We’ve learned to improvise in some
very unusual situations,” says the
team’s Unit Manager, Vanessa French.
“We’ve coped with IV lines freezing in
the Arctic, monitors that stop working
in bitter cold conditions, and been
COURTESY PICU TRANSPORT TEAM (PLANE)
14 CHQ ~ SUMMER 2006 www.capitalhealth.ca