Newsletter - Bartlett Regional Hospital

Within a few hours, Jason and his
mother, Gemma, were aboard a Learjet
on their way to Anchorage. His father
and brother followed later that day on a
commercial flight.
Organized medivac service in Southeast
Alaska, now so common as to be taken
for granted, was nonexistent 30 years
ago. In 1978, Michael Copass, MD, a
specialist in neurology and critical care
medicine who had long been associated
with Harborview Medical Center of the
University of Washington in Seattle,
was visiting Sitka to teach a course in
trauma medicine for medical practitioners.
“There was a terrible house fire in
Sitka while I was there, and three children
were severely burned,” recalled
Copass in a recent telephone interview,
remembering the tragic events
of December 2, 1978. “We had no way
to get them to a burn center. I spent all
afternoon and evening trying to find a
plane—any plane—to transport the, by
then, two survivors. We found someone
from Oregon who was able to fly up, but
it was blowing so bad in Sitka he missed
the first approach. By the time the plane
arrived, we had one survivor. The child
later died somewhere over Chatham
Strait.”
Upon learning that the last survivor had
died, Dr. Copass vowed to do what he
could to keep a similar tragedy from
ever occurring again.
He discussed the situation with two
Southeast Alaska colleagues, surgeons
Dr. George Longenbaugh of Sitka and
Dr. Henry Akiyama of Juneau, both now
deceased. “They had each sent a lot of
people to Seattle,” Copass explained.
He said the travel arrangements in
those days further compromised many
patients’ already frail medical conditions.
“Alaska Airlines was very helpful,
but it required taking out nine seats—
an arduous process.”
Copass succeeded in raising awareness
and interest at Harborview, and, by
Shelly Deering, RN, shows a fully recovered Jason the
interior of the jet that took him to Anchorage last
April.
1982, Airlift Northwest, a subsidiary of
Harborview Medical Center, was operating
in Southeast Alaska.
About the same time, trauma life-support
training began in Southeast, educating
physicians and nurses about the
latest techniques in stabilizing patients
for transport.
Today, two medivac services operate out
of Southeast Alaska: Airlift Northwest
and Guardian Flight. Every community
in the region with an airport that can
accommodate a jet airplane is served
by these two companies. More remote
locations in Southeast are served by
the U.S. Coast Guard helicopter base at
Sitka.
Eric Magnuson, a pilot who has worked
for Airlift Northwest, is now flying for
Guardian Flight. He is a big admirer
of the medivac teams. “I just drive
the plane. They are taking care of the
patients’ medical and emotional needs,
and they do it very, very well. I could not
be more impressed, and it is one of the
reasons that I like my job.”
Rick Janik, RN, is a flight nurse with
over a million miles flown on medivacs.
“The basic requirement to be an Airlift
Northwest flight nurse is five years
of critical care experience,” says Janik,
who has been with Airlift Northwest
in Juneau for 12 years. “Right now, the
most junior flight team from the Juneau
base, two nurses, has, collectively, 20
years of experience; the experience of
some of our two-person teams exceeds
50 years.”
Shelly Deering, RN, established the base
for Airlift Northwest in Juneau. “One
of the biggest things for us— those of
us who have been based here for a long
time—is the great relationship we have
with providers and the teamwork we’ve
developed with Capital City Fire & Rescue,
with the clinics, and the hospital. It
is an amazing collaboration.”
According to Deering, the Juneau crew
makes over 240 patient transports annually.
Company-wide, annual airlifts can
exceed 3,500 transports. Airlift Northwest
stations one Learjet at its base in
Juneau throughout the year, and, during
the summer, a day jet from Seattle
rotates through the larger Southeast
Alaska communities.
“The people we transport need to receive
the type of care a community hospital
can’t provide,” says Janik. “To have
specialists, you need to have a certain
volume of patients to keep the specialists
current. This is not something that
can be done in Southeast Alaska—we
see the same thing in Washington State.
The smaller hospitals have to transfer
patients that need tertiary or quaternary
care to larger medical centers.”
From the vantage point of one who pioneered
medivac transfers in Southeast
Alaska, Dr. Copass has watched Bartlett
achieve the status of a truly regional
hospital with “very good doctors and
very good nurses. I’ve come up in the
middle of the night on a Cheyenne III,
gone right into the operating room,
HouseCalls — 14