The new maternal flight crew, shortly after a press conference announcing the new system this week.
(Des Moines, IA) -- MercyOne unveiled its new helicopter statewide Maternal Transport Team this week. The service pairs trained neonatal intensive care (NICU) and maternal teams with a flight team and emergency medical technicians (EMTs).
"We're super excited to be able to start this team," said Kara Greenlee, manager of the OB and NICU flight teams, "they bring such huge amount of expertise to our team and gives us such flexibility in being able to handle whichever scenario comes up."
She says they've already had three calls.
Greenlee says it's taken a lot of cross-training from both flight crews and OB crews for the new role. New equipment is also part of the mix, including a new external fetal heart monitor.
"That allows us to monitor mom and the baby, the contractions of mom as well as the heart rate of baby, " said Ryan Gochel, MercyOne regional director of emergency transport, "that provides us the ability to understand if the baby's in distress, how close the contractions are, what eminent delivery looks like, and what steps we need to take to either slow delivery, deliver the baby, or rapidly transport." He says with many rural hospitals in the state shutting down their labor and delivery units, this service could fill the gap.
The teams, using two different helicopters, one stationed in Des Moines, the other at Knoxville, is the only of its kind in the state. MercyOne says besides air transport, emergency teams will still use ground transport for many emergency situations.