By Michael R. Duehrssen, M.D.
Southwest life Guard crew

This letter is to clarify some misconceptions concerning our helicopter (Southwest Life Guard). The helicopter is stationed at Southwest Memorial Hospital to benefit Montezuma County citizens.

A lot of commitment and effort went into obtaining a jet helicopter and adequately trai-ning our crews to air medical standards. It is an accomplishment for our community to have an air ambulance that can rapidly transport patients to and from Southwest Memorial Hospital.

We live in a remote area where rapid transport is life saving. Our helicopter can transport one critically ill or traumatized patient from field, highway, or facility at over 120 mph and land at any hospital's door step. Air Care, our closest air medical helicopter out of Farmington, has provided excellent service in the past but it takes them a good forty minutes to reach us once they are called.

If they are not in service, we then must rely on Grand Junction which takes 1.5 hours to reach us if they are available. One incident will always stand out in my mind when I couldn't get a helicopter in to transport a child who had drowned and was dying in our emergency room because of lack of tertiary pediatric center help.

In its first six months we transported 61 patients, 70 percent of these being transported out from our hospital to tertiary centers such as Farmington, Grand Junction, and Albuquerque for multisystem trauma, neurovascular surgery, and cardiothoracic emergency.

Thirty percent were scene calls, or responding to local clinics. Our average lift-off time to scene and clinics was 12 minutes once the call was received by dispatch.

We have been credentialled to fly into Utah and New Mexico. Each state sent teams to Cortez to look at our helicopter and program. They were both pleased with our program and certified us to fly into their states. New Mexico and Utah follow strict national air medical standards. We can also fly into Colorado and Arizona which have no state protocols at this time. Southwest Life Guard sits on the Colorado state committee in charge of establishing state protocols for air medical transport.

We meet in Denver on a quarterly basis. In any air medical program there is a significant amount of pubic relations that must be done. This is to ensure the survival of the program by making the community aware of its capabilities and training different departments in helicopter safety. The company that owns our helicopter is Classic Helicopters, Inc. out of Salt Lake City. It has placed money aside specified for public relations. We have flown to fire departments, hospitals, and community events in the Four Corners area. We have flown community members such as the Boy Scouts and on two occasions we flew our own crew to a meeting, an emergency department annual social.

The pilot and medical crew are required by our policies to respond within 10 minutes to the helicopter once called, which means wherever the crew is the helicopter equipment must also be. Not only can it be used for air medical, but also for law enforcement, search and rescue, and fire support.. Our crew members have also spent many hours and committed much time to promote our services.

Unfortunately, the helicopter has been temporarily relocated to Salt Lake City because of a decrease in patient transports through the winter months. It will be back next May and we are diligently working on keeping it all year long.