LifeFlight Air Ambulance Service

To improve the health of our community by transporting critically ill and injured patients by air and ground - utilizing evidence-based care in a safe and collaborative design - and by providing education to our patients, their families and community healthcare partners.

LifeFlight is dedicated to providing the best outcome - every patient, every time.

LifeFlight will have available both O negative Packed Red Blood Cells (PRBC's) and AB Plasma, understanding that only a small fraction of our total patient population will require the emergent administration of these products. The recipients of this will have benefits that will be long-lasting.

The purpose for this pursuit was to reduce our reliance on referring facilities, speed the administration of products, and improve patient outcome. In this pursuit, we learned many of our referring hospitals have 0-4 units of O negative blood available any given day. Additionally, they have zero units of Plasma available in the thawed and ready state. The fastest any referring hospital could provide Plasma was approximately 45 minutes, in ideal conditions.

UnityPoint Health LifeFlight transports critically ill or injured adult, pediatric and neonatal patients. Specialty services provided include Nitric Ventilation, Intra-Aortic Balloon Pump, Bariatric and Obstetrics.

UnityPoint Health LifeFlight will transport to the most appropriate hospital destination based on the clinical needs of the patient and/or determined by the attending physician. Air medical transport is a medical decision, based on information available at the time of transfer. Hospital destination is an independent decision from mode of transport.

American College of Emergency Physicians, suggested guidelines for EMS and regional healthcare systems Air Medical Transport utilization to facilitate proper patient selection and ensure clinical benefit.

Clinical benefit can be provided by:

• Meaningfully shortening the time of delivery of definitive care to patients with time-sensitive medical conditions.
• Providing necessary specialized medical expertise and specialty staff to patients before and/or during transport.
• Providing necessary equipment including High Flow Nasal Cannula, IABP, Nitric, blood products to patients before and/or during transport.
• Providing transport to patients inaccessible by other means of transport or ground transport time impeded by road conditions/traffic patterns.
• Air medical transport may serve as a resource during multi-casualty incidents or disasters when patient influx overwhelms local resources.