By RORY MOORE
Tiger Media Network
The Fort Hays Association of Nursing Students partnered with EagleMed to host a tour of the air medical transport service’s hangar at Hays Regional Airport on Tuesday. Students were given an up-close look at the service’s duties inside the facility, where they learned about the medical kits flight nurses use, how patients are cared for and carried onto and off the EagleMed Bell 404 helicopter, and what procedures are used on patients mid-flight.
The Fort Hays Association of Nursing Students walks into the EagleMed hangar of Hays Regional Airport for a tour of the facility. 
Doug McDaniel, base medical manager of EagleMed, shows a medical kit. 
The interior of the helicopter is displayed to students, showing medical gear and how flight nurses perform on patients. 
Freshman Ava Sanders practices CPR on a dummy. 
Flight Nurse Sarah Christopherson shows how to carry a patient out of a helicopter. 
Sanders performs in-throat intubation on a dummy under McDaniel’s tutelage. 
EagleMed uses a Bell 404 helicopter to transport patients.
Base Medical Manager Doug McDaniel guided the tour alongside Flight Nurse Sarah Christopherson. Both have worked together for years and gave students insight into their work.
“We are a mobile ICU (Intensive Care Unit) air medical unit,” Christopherson said. “We haul patients older than 30 days up till very elderly geriatrics. We provide any kind of ICU need that a patient would need up to intubation or mechanical ventilation. We can perform some minor surgical procedures such as chest tubes or cricothyrotomies.”
EagleMed’s services, as Christopherson notes, are not limited to high-risk medical emergencies.
“We’ll take even less critical patients because we seem to be a convenient transport for patients that are several hours away by ground from their sending facility,” she said. “We also do interfacility and scene flight transports for EMS (Emergency Medical Services) and hospitals.”
The one difficulty flight nurses have with transporting patients is weight, size, and how they work around that difficulty with their equipment.
“Our equipment will accommodate up to 450 pounds,” Christopherson said. “Typically, We have an issue with the girth of the patient and not being able to accommodate that much weight, but we do what we can to take up all that weight in the helicopter.”
From a trainee’s perspective, the FHANS students received an understanding of the technicalities and responsibilities of air medical transportation while also realizing the high-stress job of flight nursing.
Senior Kaia Miller learned those lessons during the tour.
“They don’t teach us a lot about flight nursing in school,” she said. “I work at the hospital [HaysMed], so I’ve seen them pick patients up, but I’ve never seen the inside of a helicopter or any of the processes they do in there.”
What stood out the most to Miller was the challenge of working in the small helicopter space for flight nurses.
“I’ve done code blues and CVR (Cardiovascular Resuscitation) in my clinicals, and there’s barely enough room in a hospital room to do all that,” she said. “ I can’t imagine doing it in a little helicopter and by yourself or with two people in that little area.”
After learning its necessities in the tour, the thought of being a flight nurse is daunting for Miller.
“I do think it would be a big adjustment from being a bedside nurse,” she said. “You’d really have to get used to doing everything in that small space. In a hospital, you’ve got all your resources that you need down the hall, but in a helicopter, you have whatever you have in the air, and that’s about it. That would be a big learning curve, and I feel I would want a lot of experience before I did anything like that.”