Scene times for helicopter crews on interfacility transfers

[ohiovolffemtp]

For those of you that transfer patients via helicopter from your ED to other facility: how much time do the flight crews spend in your department and in the helicopter before lifting off?

I'm seeing times spent in the building of 40-60 minutes routinely, which seems long to me.  Most of my transfers are intubated patients on a vent with 1-2 drips going, usually post-intubation sedation.  In some cases, the total time on scene exceeds the time it would have taken my EMS crews to drive to the destination facility (they can and routinely do handle drips, vents, etc).

I'm used to shorter times, both from working with other services in other states and from scene flights when I'm doing EMS.

[EMEDPA]

I have noticed this as well. For patients I really need gone right now, I personally wheel them out to the pad and hand them off to the crew as soon as the rotors stop. Had a recent Aortic dissection (who lived!) and I told the crew "the surgeon is waiting for you and expects the patient on the table in 30 minutes".  Their ground time was like 5 minutes. Get to know your helicopter crews so you can say "this one needs to go right now" and they believe you. I am fortunate in that I work at 4 facilities in the catchment area for the local medevac service so the crews all know me and a lot of the nurses work with me as their side jobs. It's nice to be able to say " oh, hey Jane, this one is a really unstable stemi and needs to be in the cath lab yesterday" and they just go with it.