LifeFlight Helps Train Guard Medics
By Dawn Gagnon, Bangor Daily News, Maine
Dec. 14–BANGOR — Staff Sgt. Mark Urquhart, a flight medic with the Maine Army National Guard, spent Thursday morning working to save the life of a “patient” who was in bad shape.
The patient was a 19-year-old soldier who was traveling in a Humvee when a roadside bomb exploded, resulting in head and lung injuries and amputating his leg at the knee.
After applying a tourniquet to stop the leg from bleeding, Urquhart had to contend with the patient’s breathing problems that required he insert an airway — a procedure complicated by swelling in his patient’s throat — and help him breathe with the help of a bag-valve mask.
Urquhart also had to insert a large needle into his patient’s chest to remove air that became trapped in one of his lungs and to administer life-saving drugs.
Though the medical crisis described above actually was part of a training exercise, the scenario is one that Urquhart and his colleagues from Company C of the Army Guard’s 126th Medical Company are likely to encounter during a yearlong deployment to Iraq that begins in January, according to Maj. Brian Veneziano, a helicopter pilot and the unit’s commander.
More than 100 members of the Bangor-based medical unit are being sent to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, their second trip there since the current conflict in the Middle East began.
The first deployment, which came early in the war, involved gaining access to new ground and setting up medical work areas. Little infrastructure was in place at the time.
“We slept on the helicopters,” said Staff Sgt. Deborah Urquhart, a unit medic married to Staff Sgt. Mark Urquhart.
Since then, she said, hospitals and residential facilities have been built.
“It should be a lot more developed,” she said.
Veneziano said the Maine-based medics help save not only U.S. troops, but also anyone else who needs their help, whether they be troops from the nation’s allies, Iraqi civilians or insurgents.
“We take the whole gamut,” Veneziano said.
The training, which began Thursday and wraps up today, is a first-of-a-kind joint venture with the LifeFlight Foundation, which made its Human Patient Simulator Program available to the flight medics.
The simulator is a human mannequin, named Stan D. Ardman (or Standard Man), designed to accurately mirror human responses to such medical procedures as CPR, intravenous medication, intubation, ventilation and catheterization, according to a fact sheet provided by LifeFlight.
As far as training equipment goes, the simulator is high-tech and eerily realistic. It has a heartbeat and a pulse. It breathes, blinks, moans and speaks. It can be programmed to react to whatever medications it is administered. It even bleeds, though not real blood.
Stan is housed in a large specially modified RV that has been reconfigured as a hospital emergency department trauma room. The computerized nerve center, in a separate part of the RV, has video equipment so training sessions can be critiqued later.
The RV, however, is much more spacious than the tight quarters afforded by the unit’s Black Hawk helicopters, which carry up to four patients at a time.
Until now, the hands-on training made possible by the simulator has been limited to civilians, namely personnel from Maine’s hospitals, clinics and public safety agencies, said Melissa Arndt, spokeswoman for the foundation.
The foundation is the nonprofit branch of LifeFlight of Maine devoted to educational outreach, public relations and fundraising, she said, adding that the $400,000 simulator and RV setup were purchased through a 2003 bond issue for emergency medical services.
“This is a way for us to support their mission,” said Rick Simpson, a LifeFlight trainer who was among those who brought the simulator to the Army Aviation Flight Facility, located on the Army Guard base off Maine Avenue, near Bangor International Airport.
The medical company’s deployment begins in January and is expected to end in January 2009, Veneziano said.
The unit comprises more than 100 members, nine of them medics and the rest their support personnel, including helicopter pilots and air and ground mechanics, to name a few.
After a public send-off ceremony set for Jan. 8, the unit will head to Fort Sill, Okla., for two months of additional pre-deployment training.
The group is expected to arrive in Iraq late in March or early April, where it will replace a Minnesota Army National Guard medical company with which it is rotating, Veneziano said.
Unit members range from age 18 to 60. While most are men, the group includes more than a dozen women, he said.
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