Medical-helicopter crash, response simulated in training at Mesa medical center

By Richard Dyer
Mail | X: @RHDyer

The majority of the six “victims” in a recent mock helicopter crash in Mesa had no outward sign they were injured but were identified by the bright pink vests they were wearing.

Those being trained were told it was a simulation of a medical-helicopter transfer of a pregnant patient from the HonorHealth Florence Medical Center with a hard landing with injuries on the helipad at HonorHealth Mountain Vista Medical Center in Mesa.

Mesa Fire and Medical Department and Superstition Fire and Medical District personnel, who were already on-site when the call came in at 9 a.m. June 5, donned full firefighting gear in the 90-plus-degree heat before assessing the patients’ needs, deciding by triage which patient needed care first, setting up and using a water hose and running caution tape for part of a perimeter.

The patients — a mannequin representing the pregnant patient who was strapped to a gurney in the helicopter, a hospital security official who was nearby when it landed and was injured, a pilot and air crew from the PHI Air Medical copter — were transferred to hospital beds on wheels and taken into the hospital.

The pregnant patient’s vitals were written in pen on a glass door. Medical personnel trained in procedures for the successful birth of the baby. Individuals swapped out to perform CPR on the mannequin when told the victim had coded and was in cardiac arrest. Cheers were later heard in the room when it was announced that the victim’s heart had started and she was alive.

Three of the people considered patients in the simulation were the PHI Air Medical copter personnel based at HonorHealth Mountain Vista Medical Center, 1301 S. Crismon Road in Mesa — Mark Payne, Amber Kersh and Joel Nelsen.

By working to save the patients including the three they knew, hospital personnel and fire crews would learn to put aside emotion and use muscle memory to assess and treat the patients, officials said.

“It’s a small field and so everybody knows each other and they work with each other... And when you come in and out of the hospital often, you start knowing people and so it does play a role in it because you know them. But when it’s time to do your job you’re going to have to switch that piece off regardless (if) it is someone you know or not because you have a job to do and if your emotions get involved it can cloud your judgment,” said Robert Campa, Mesa Fire and Medical Department emergency manager.

“Just going through this will help overcome that. You’re not going to stop that for sure when it’s the people who you work with every day, but having to kind of walk through it would give you something to fall back on the tasks, try not to focus on that emotion as you’re getting everybody out. It definitely would be a very stressful event,” said David Pohlman, SFMD deputy chief in training and EMS.

The idea to have a helicopter as part of the simulation started with a question from an employee at HonorHealth Mountain Vista Medical Center in Mesa. They asked what the best practice was to transfer patients from the helicopter into the emergency department from the helipad, said Kory Sneed, manager of emergency management and environmental health and safety for HonorHealth.

“We want to throw things out there to make it a be a little chaotic. We want it to be things that maybe they’re not used to so that in the real world if it happens they can pull from that file cabinet, remember they have been here before, and now they know how to respond to it,” he said. “What’s that limit where we want the staff to go? We don’t want them to go through the gate (to the helipad). Why? That thing could go up and explode... We’re not trained for the hot zone — that’s fire and then they’ll handle that.”

Fire and hospital officials met in groups after the training to discuss what went right and what could be done better, Sneed said.

“What are those things we are taking away from what we just did? And that’s really the goal of every exercise — what we learned and what are we taking away from what we learned?” he said.

Pohlman did not participate with SFMD in the medical-helicopter hard-landing scenario but observed how it went.

“Great joint drill. It’s great practice for the guys and gals to do this drill of something you rarely see out in the field and then coordinate with the hospital staff,” he said.

Campa, who also observed the event, liked the questions that were asked by MFMD officials of the helicopter crew.

“(W)e can understand the cross-collaboration, we can put faces to names ... and asking the questions of how things work, where they work, why they work so that they understand when it is time of need they are not asking these questions, ‘How do we open this, how do we take this off?’ They already know that ahead of time so if this were to happen in the future, they know how to open up every piece of that helicopter,” he said.

SFMD, MFMD and HonorHealth regularly have discussion-based tabletop training in addition to simulations such as at the medical center.

“All kinds. Drills like this where we are actually trying to do kind of specialized functions, we’re pulling hose or taking hydrants or doing the triage ... or extrication and they’re moving the patients like where they belong in the hospital. But we also do tabletop, general-education stuff ... In this instance it would be just the helicopter operations, where the shutoffs are, what to do if the shutoffs don’t exist anymore because of the crash — that kind of thing,” Pohlman said.

“We try to do at least three to four or five a year where we do tabletop discussions; we’ve already done two in the past month,” Campa said. “We work with Mesa Gateway Airport, with Falcon Field and we do scenario training as well. We just had a tabletop with a downed helicopter at Falcon Field similar to this situation.”

Tabletop exercises are held regularly at HonorHealth’s nine hospitals, said Bill Baer, senior media relations specialist for HonorHealth Corporate.

“(W)e also do these for real-world experiences,” he said. “So all nine of our medical centers we will have some kind of scenario. Because the goal is we want to train and have everybody working together and going by muscle memory.”

The full-scale HonorHealth exercises are held about twice a year, Sneed said.

“And that means we’re involving community partners — so our fire departments, local police departments,” he said. “Typically every three years it’s required to do a heliport-type exercise.”

Richard H. Dyer can be reached at rdyer@iniusa.org, or on X @rhdyer. To voice your opinion on this story, connect with us at AzOpinions@iniusa.org.

Richard Dyer
Managing Editor | East Valley

rdyer@iniusa.org

Richard Dyer has worked at Independent Newsmedia, Inc.. USA, since 1987. Since 2009, he has worked as a volunteer to design The Blue Guitar Magazine, Blue Guitar Jr. magazine and Unstrung magazine, which are projects of The Arizona Consortium for the Arts; and since 2014, has been overseeing the art submissions. He also is an artist of welded-steel sculptures, selling his artwork at juried and non-juried art shows