A Day In the Life: Critical Care Flight Paramedic

Hey guys my name is Sam and welcome to prepmedic for those of you who don't know outside of YouTube my full time job is as a

critical

care

flight

paramedic

so for this week's video I thought it would be a good idea make a Day in the Life Video where I take you guys for a full 24 hour shift, show you everything the job entails, obviously we have to start with the morning routine so it's around 3 :30 a.m. m. I've already had a cup of coffee and we're about to go workout, so my workouts always consist of some strength training and then a resistance component.

I have a bike and a treadmill that I use relatively regularly, so these workouts were programmed for me by a tactical human, which is a fitness. service essentially that takes into account the demands of being a first responder in the military, kind of, and they've tailored this program for me, so I'm not sponsored by them or anything like that. I just discovered that having applicable workouts really makes a difference, instead of going through a program that you know, try to become a bodybuilder or an extreme endurance athlete, I just need things that allow me to do my job over a long period of time , the training is finally finished and fortunately, although I have been filming all morning.

I still have time to grab a coffee and take a quick shower before I go to work. Let's hit the road, so today's shift we're going to have a 24 hour shift. I work two days a week. Job. Thursdays and Saturdays I'm in an intensive

care

truck on the ground and then Saturdays I'm in a helicopter so I really like that schedule, it's not for everyone just because you know you can be up all night sometimes we don't do anything but most of the time you're running on lack of sleep, that also gives me a lot of free time during the week to watch my son do his thing, produce these videos, things like that, so you know, I really enjoy Lifeline. loud and clear today you have eric as your pilot, sam is your doctor and alyssa as your nurse, very good, good morning guys, so today looks good for flying, we can go northeast and south right now, the mountains to the West are snowing, eh, yeah.

I have a segment for turbulence, so plan on it to be bumpy once we get to a few hundred feet above the ground, so yeah, just check your NVGs and make sure they're ready to go. Make sure there's nothing broken in them and stuff like that. I am safe. I'm safe, I'm safe, so there's our helicopter, it's a star that has about 1,000 horsepower, a top speed of about 160 miles per hour, we use it because it's cheap to operate and it's also very good at height. altitude, so I don't know if you can see it with this lens, but the rocky mountains are there and we fly towards them all the time, so one of our first responsibilities in the morning is to check every bag and compartment in the helicopter.

The helicopter tests all the machinery. and the equipment there just to make sure it works and is ready to go for the day, so we are a

critical

care medical helicopter, we fly with a pilot, a doctor and a nurse, obviously, and then we make both 911 calls. We call those scene

flight

s and inter-facility transfers IFT if someone has to go from one place to another but they have a lot of advanced things done to them, like they have a booster, a balloon pump, require a lot of drips or are intubated. and we need a ventilator, that's usually when we'll take them instead of an advanced

life

support ground ambulance now that we've done the helicopter checks, the pilots get this daily briefing, we have to come in and the previous shifts call so that any flights they had performed we review and make sure there are no clinical errors, it is a good learning experience for them and helps keep our care up to par.

We also have a lot of continuing education that we have to do, so we have monthly and quarterly continuing education that happens on the computer and in person, so try to get some of that out of the way in the next two hours. No ems on the scene yet? Not yet, no, they just sent it, so they sent us to a scene. Our target lift time is less than 10 minutes. We can usually get through it pretty well, but we'll fly into the mountains. It is a little cloudy. but there's nothing to worry about at one to zero, so the

life

guards called us off before we even got there.

It turned out that they didn't need a helicopter. Sometimes the dispatch information is a little different from what is actually happening here. We can look at what kind of educational things the nurse is doing, oh wait she's just tick-tock, tick-tock, come on man Eric, what advice would you give to everyone? If you want to be a pilot, you still have to do the paperwork, don't do it. unless you absolutely love aviation and absolutely dream of being a pilot, otherwise it will be painful of course there will be three souls on board or off to take off here in about a minute we will be 18 minutes en route around um HOE 5,300, 2 hours of fuel without warning lights the gauges have a good view outside, let's go sterilized guys, do you have all the things? everything. everything. so tower, you can transition, the airspace meter altimeter is 3012. and sure, okay, okay, how big are the snow banks around this thing, maybe a foot, tail inside the circle, yeah, tail circle, okay, good start, check the skids, get on board, okay, let's get everything straight. to come   broadly one last exit return risk  receive request in progress metro wood 3013   3013 life line one in virus give me those stickers real quick   eh, obviously, there's a lot of things we can't show  just because of the hipaawa, you know, I wish we could show you a little bit more of the critical care medicine that we do because that's really the job.

The helicopter is cool, but ultimately it's just a vehicle that took the third flight. Another internal facility relatively close by. It's getting a little late, which brings us to two patient flights. and one cancelled, that's pretty typical for this type of shift, now it's time to do some charts and go to bed if we can, hopefully we can get some rest tonight, we made it through the night without any more calls, let's switch gears shift. There you have it guys, a full 24 hour shift with a flight

paramedic

. I hope it was entertaining or at least a little informative.

If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below and I'll see you next week. Yeah.