When minutes mean the difference between life and death, CALSTAR helicopter medical crews save lives. It’s that simple.
Maybe it’s a woman pinned in her SUV, near death after a tire blowout on U.S. 101. Maybe it’s a man who rolled his tanker truck and is trapped in the cab, unconscious, north of Hollister. Maybe it’s a teen-age girl whose boyfriend stabbed her in their Gilroy bedroom. Maybe it’s a woman who fell from her mountain bike and cracked her head on the rocks in Santa Cruz County.
If such people can get to surgery in less than an hour – the “Golden Hour,” as emergency personnel refer to it – their chances of surviving increase 70 to 80 percent, according to CALSTAR.
For that reason, the “thud, thud, thud” of helicopter rotors is the sound of salvation.
It takes a ground ambulance about an hour in the smoothest of traffic to get from Hollister to a San Jose trauma center. In heavy traffic, forget about it.
CALSTAR can fly right over the gridlock and make a trip from U.S. 101 near Gilroy in 12 minutes every time.
En route, flight nurses whose training is a notch above paramedics’ can be treating the patient, keeping him or her alive.
“It’s you. There are no doctors to contact,” flight nurse Tom Zoltanski says as he waits for a call at CALSTAR’s base at Saint Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy. “You have to decide what is going on and, with your partner, decide what the best mode of treatment would be.”
In many ways, it’s not that different from “M*A*S*H.” In every episode of the popular 1970s and ’80s television show, set at a Korean War field hospital, a bubble-cockpit chopper would land with patients strapped to its skids.
Today’s medical transport helicopters have room for patients inside, to spare them from the rotors’ blast of wind and dirt, but like on “M*A*S*H,” the people who do this duty bring to the job a mix of military professionalism, conscientiousness and humor.
“We work very autonomously,” says flight nurse Mary Foraker, a 12-year CALSTAR veteran. “It’s an adventure … and it’s fun. … The people who do this job like to be challenged. They like stress. They like to make decisions – that kind of person.”
“It’s better than working for a living,” says pilot Chris Crandall, a former Army pilot who rides a motorcycle to work. He figures that CALSTAR “is probably a mix of half and half, military training and otherwise.”
It was in “M*A*S*H”-era Korea that the U.S. military developed the Golden Hour principle, Foraker explains.
“If you got a patient to surgery within one hour of their injury,” the military found, “their (chances of) survival increased about 80 percent.
“So in Vietnam, they had an almost 90 percent survival rate,” Foraker says.
“No soldier in Vietnam was more than 20 minutes from a medevac unit because of the helicopters – and that’s not the case for the general public today.”
CALSTAR, a 20-year-old nonprofit organization, has seven helicopters and one airplane based throughout California, from Ukiah in the north to Santa Maria in the south and east to Lake Tahoe.
Other companies, mostly for-profit, also operate throughout the state. The next closest is Stanford Life Flight, which generally serves Stanford University Hospital.
A CALSTAR chopper in Salinas operates on weekends, but on weekdays, the Gilroy base serves all of Santa Clara, San Benito, Monterey and Santa Cruz counties and parts of western Merced County. They take most patients to San Jose, but farther south and east they fly to a trauma center in Fresno.
Why a trauma center and not just a hospital emergency room? ERs get bogged down with heart attacks and bee stings, strokes and stitches, and at off hours their doctors may be on call rather than on duty. Trauma centers have surgeons and anesthesiologists working around the clock to immediately treat acute injuries.
The South Valley’s two hospitals, Saint Louise in Gilroy and Hazel Hawkins in Hollister, don’t have trauma centers. The nearest ones are the San Jose Medical Center and the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, also in San Jose.
Without the combination of trauma centers and helicopters, more people die. It’s called “preventable death” in the rescue industry.
Foraker says that a decade ago in Santa Cruz County, where she lives, the preventable death rate was around 35 percent. Then they started using helicopters. Now it’s comparable with Santa Clara County’s rate of less than 1 percent, she says.
Zoltanski and Foraker begin their 24-hour shift inspecting the drugs and medical supplies they keep in the helicopter.
“You really have to know where things are; you can’t be fumbling,” Zoltanski says. “Being very organized is the key rule.”
It’s extremely rare for a day to go by without a call, but today there is nothing going on for the Gilroy CALSTAR crew. Foraker, Zoltanski and Crandall pass the time chatting and Internet surfing. They also take turns napping.
“They encourage you to get some rest when you can,” Zoltanski says of his supervisors. “When you get called out at 4 in the morning, they want you to be nice and fresh. You have to make very important decisions and, most importantly, stay safe around moving aircraft.”
A helicopter is “fiercely expensive” to maintain and operate, Zoltanski says, and CALSTAR staff are highly trained professionals, so making ends meet is always a challenge for the nonprofit.
Officially, CALSTAR charges each patient about $12,000 per flight, but it rarely collects that amount. Unlike some air-ambulance organizations, CALSTAR never checks patients’ insurance or income before transporting them. Whatever portion insurance or the patient can’t or won’t pay, CALSTAR absorbs. For many calls – gang fights or field worker accidents, for example – flight nurses have a pretty good guess before they take off that they won’t recover a penny.
But they always fly.
CALSTAR also collects revenues from donations and annual membership fees: $45 for an individual and $50 for a family. To find out about the benefits of membership, call 1-888-207-LIFE.
