Helicopter service takes off at new Mercy Medical Center

Dressed in a flight suit and a helmet, Ron Haver had the pilot look down pat.

He should.

The helicopter pilot has been flying the big birds for 20 years, mostly for the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Office.

But Haver has a bit of a different job now. Instead of looking for pot growers or bad guys on the run, the helicopter pilot now flies critically ill patients from the local hospital and from the scene of accidents to trauma hospitals.

Haver is a pilot for Medi-Flight, an air ambulance that is stationed at Merced Regional Airport.

"I wasn't flying enough, and the sheriff's budget was getting cut," Haver said. "This way I get to fly more."

Since Mercy Medical Center opened its new hospital on North G Street, Medi-Flight has the ability to take patients directly from the hospital to a helicopter.

The hospital built a landing pad just yards from the emergency room doors, and since the hospital opened in May, there have been about 22 helicopter landings a month.

Carrie Grissom, the liaison between the hospital and the local and regional emergency medical system, said in the past the drill to get a patient from Merced's hospital to a higher level hospital in another town was complicated.

"We had to make the request, and then call Riggs to go out to the airport and pick up the Medi-Flight team," Grissom said. "Riggs would bring them to the hospital, they'd put the patient in an ambulance, drive the person to the airport and then put them on a helicopter."

Now when Medi-Flight is called, the helicopter leaves the airport, flies to the hospital and picks up the patient. It takes the helicopter about two minutes to make the flight from the airport to the hospital, and then it's about 20 minutes to Modesto's trauma hospitals.

"By default we've cut the time way back," said Philip Brown, director of Mercy's emergency department. "When it comes to time, time saves lives."

Along with Medi-Flight, Children's Hospital Central California also picks up patients at Mercy with Air George, the Madera hospital's easy-to-spot helicopter, which is festooned with the hospital's mascot, George the giraffe, on the side.

Micheline Golden, spokeswoman for Children's Hospital, said the air ambulance is usually used to transport critically ill newborns, but it also transports older children.

"When Mercy requests our team to transport the kids, that usually means there's something inherently critical about the patients," Golden said. "It takes a ground ambulance about one hour and 20 minutes to get from Mercy to our hospital; the helicopter takes 17 to 20 minutes, so we will usually use the air ambulance if our team is requested."

In July, Golden said four pediatric patients were transported from Mercy to Children's. In August, there were three pediatric patients and seven newborns transported.

"Although we also use ground ambulances to transport children to Madera, we are now routinely seeing Air George land here," said Grissom.

The hospital had planned for a helicopter landing pad from the very beginning, Brown said. "When we first started talking about a new hospital 10 years ago, we had a landing pad in the plans."

Mercy decided to put the landing pad away from the hospital, not on the roof, like many metropolitan hospitals have.

"We don't have to go down six flights of stairs with a patient," Brown said. "Roofs are usually used when there's no land around the hospital to use for pad."

Don Campbell, the business director for Medi-Flight, said the air ambulance company is owned by Air Methods out of Denver.

"Having the landing pad at the hospital has a huge impact on the community," Campbell said.

Brown agreed.

"It's wonderful to have all the components to save a life right here at the hospital," he said.

Reporter Carol Reiter can be reached at (209) 385-2486 or creiter@mercedsun-star.com