Hi, I’m Dan Friel.
I’m a critical care transport nurse here at Penn State Hershey Medical Center and this
is the newest addition to the Life Lion Program and I would like to take a minute to show
you around.
Welcome aboard!
This is the medical interior of the newest Life Lion helicopter here at Penn State Hershey
Medical Center.
And so to give you a little bit of a tour around the aircraft, we’ll start up here
at the head.
And what we have been able to do when we designed the interior of this aircraft is design it
for maximal use of space.
We don’t have a lot of room to work back here so all of the equipment that we spec’d
out and the equipment we were able to obtain now is much smaller and lighter than it used
to be in the past.
This heart monitor, cardiac monitor up here is a Pro Pack MD and it’s becoming the standard
in this industry and is much smaller and lighter, more functional than any similar pieces of
equipment we had in the past.
This allows us to monitor multiple parameters of the patient’s vital signs, this allows
us to transport this much easier and strap it to the rest of our equipment and weighs
much, much less than it used to but still fully functional.
This is the airway section of the helicopter and it’s designed to be at the head of the
patient where we are sitting here that we have maximal access to the patients airway.
Up here is the ventilators and as I talked about having newer and lighter equipment this
ventilator is probably 5 or 10 pounds lighter than the last ventilator we had.
It’s much easier to remove and transport and only weighs about 8 pounds or so.
This is the control panel that we use to control the functions of everything in the back of
the aircraft and what it does is it allows us two separate positions to control oxygen,
air, electrical power and vacuum and suction.
So what we have here is a communication panel next to next to that and what that allows
us to do is talk to the physicians in the emergency department when we have a patient
on board.
It also allows us to talk to the fire departments, police departments and the first responders
on the scene of an accident.
Storage and configuration of our equipment is kept in these drawers, certain things,
extra medications and certain patient pieces of equipment we need for monitoring, blood
pressure, NG tubes, oxygen accessories, things like that are kept in these drawers.
We also have a special drawer that’s kept warm all of the time at 104 degrees.
And that’s designed to keep our IV fluids warm for our hypothermic patients and certain
pieces of equipment that we want to keep warm for pediatrics and neonates.
My name is Drew Yoder, I am a critical care transport paramedic with Life lion.
And today I am going to be talking to you about the newest technology we have to offer
here on Life Lion which is video laryngoscopy.
What it consists of is a high-resolution video screen.
It has a laryngoscope with a light and a camera on the end of that.
This allows us to view the anatomy of the airway and assist us in placing the tracheal
tube.
It takes a lot of stress out of the intubation, so when you are at 3:00 AM intubating someone
upside down in a car it really helps take down the stress of it.
Allows you to properly identify the anatomy of the airway and place a tube.
This is a mannequin.
So we’ll pretend that this patient has been properly sedated and paralyzed for intubation,
so I’m going to go ahead and intubate, you can watch on the screen here and we’ll view
the anatomy of the airway and we’ll pass the AT tube into the trachea.
So we’re inserting our blade, locating our anatomy in our airway here.
Alright, we found the trachea and now we’re going to place the AT tube, you see the AT
tube emerge in the camera, and go into the vocal cords, and balloons passing through
the cords and the tube is seated in the vocal cords.
At this point, we can video tape that, we can take a still photo of that for proper
documentation for our charting.
[Radio communications] Hello, my name is Doug Turk, I’m chief pilot
for Life Lion air medical service.
I’m going to give you a look inside the cockpit of our newest aircraft, we made some
upgrades and I think you’re going to like what you see.
Here we are in the Life Lion pilot’s office, this is where we do our work, and we’re
really proud of our cockpit.
The displays right in front of me are what we call flight instrument displays that tell
the pilot the attitude of the aircraft, air speed, the altitude and so forth.
And, over to the center is our avionics display.
It’s a one-stop-shop for all of our communications, navigation, situational awareness that we’ve
incorporated and this is the newest and latest, greatest addition to our cockpit.
Right now it’s on what we call our topical graphical display and it actually shows exactly
where the helicopter is right now.
We can focus in on it and as we move in we can see that the helicopter is sitting on
the pad at the hanger of the Hershey Medical Center.
I’m Michael Johnson with Penn State Hershey Medical Center.
I’m the director of maintenance of Life Lion.
This is an AS365N2 model.
That’s a Eurocopter, it’s a French made aircraft, it is one of the safest aircrafts
of the EMS purposes.
We have three fulltime mechanics that are FFA certified and school-trained to work on
the airframe and engines of this aircraft.
For an EMS industry seconds count, time is critical for transporting patients that are
in need