By NATHAN WELTON
The Tribune (San Luis Obispo, Calif.)
San Luis Obispo’s main ambulance company has added to its fleet a new vehicle that functions like an intensive care unit on wheels.
San Luis Ambulance’s Critical Care Transport Unit is expected to make inter-hospital patient transfers safer and quicker and should help alleviate staffing burdens that result when one hospital has to send a nurse to another facility when moving patients.
The ambulance is the first of its kind in the county and will become the go-to unit when hospitals need to move their most critical patients from one place to another. The local company invested $225,000 to launch the new vehicle and expects to use it several times a day.
“Transport will happen faster, and they’ll have all this technology readily available, with staff trained to provide the care,” said Dr. Paul Georghiou, chief of staff at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center and medical director with the ambulance company.
The ambulance’s introduction comes a few months after Caltrans shuttered the helicopter landing pads at Twin Cities Community Hospital and French Hospital Medical Center for not being up to code.
Those were the only two landing pads at county hospitals and aren?t expected to be in operation any time soon.
Their closure complicated patient transfers to other hospitals because helicopters were previously the only way to move critical care patients with all the necessary equipment.
Because of the closures, transports in and out of those hospitals need to be routed by land to the nearest airport, which adds time and hassle. And poor weather can also ground the helicopters.
The new ambulance offers a number of upgrades for critically ill patients. It has its own miniature infusion pump, which monitors the types of medications patients receive. Before, paramedics had to rely on gravity drips or use bulky hospital pumps that can only handle two medicines at once.
It also has a small ventilator that gives people artificial breaths. Hospital ventilators are too big to fit into an ambulance. So paramedics in standard ambulances must ventilate patients by squeezing a rubber bubble, which prevents them from providing any other sort of care.
The ambulance also has a sophisticated monitor that provides nurses and paramedics with more, and more accurate, information.
The machine measures the amount of carbon dioxide that patients are exhaling, which indicates how well their lungs are working. It also works in conjunction with a sensor embedded in a major vein to report blood pressure in real time, as opposed to an automated cuff that pumps itself up every so often. And it serves as an echocardiogram machine, an external temperature monitor and an external pacemaker, all rolled into one.
Much of that wasn?t available on the older monitoring units in ambulances.
Another perk is that the company hired 10 nurses to staff the new ambulance and because it comes with its own dedicated nurse, it keeps hospitals fully staffed.
“Giving one (nurse) up lessens the ability of the emergency room to treat patients,” said Joe Piedalue, the company?s director of operations. “And that’s not a good thing.”