Flight transport nursing is a specialty that involves facilitating safe air travel for patients that need to be moved via aircraft. Receiving emergent medical care is already a potentially frightening experience, so nurses working in moving aircrafts must be able to calm and comfort their patients while also providing necessary medical attention. It’s quite the feat!
Who Needs a Flight Nurse?
There are many reasons why a person may require the medical assistance provided by a flight or transport nurse. Some of these might include:
- Serious, life-threatening injuries that cannot be attended to adequately on-site
- Elderly patients being transported for palliative or end-of-life care who cannot be unattended
- Patients on life support or who need constant assistance and must be relocated for treatment
- Women in labor who have no other way to get to a medical facility
In all of these scenarios, risks can be incurred in transporting a patient. It is the job of the transport nurse on duty to minimize these dangers and make the trip to the hospital as safe as possible.
What Makes a Transport Nurse?
Nurses who work in aircraft transport situations have to be skilled medical providers, but they must also possess certain personality traits that assist them in giving patients in peril and panic a sense of calm in the midst of craziness.
Some characteristics of a good flight transport nurse might include:
- Patient-first mentality. As with any medical profession, these nurses must provide care as a reaction of compassion to their patients’ needs.
- Focus and the ability to work under pressure in a fast-paced, chaotic environment.
- Independence, and the faith in one’s training to provide them with the tools they need to do their job correctly, even when the tangible tools are not present.
These are not qualities that every person possesses, which makes it even more obvious that flight nurses are a special kind of people. With the health and wellbeing of people in some of the worst possible situations riding on their shoulders, transport nurses provide excellent care while maintaining a cool head. They’re the masters of making the best out of a bad situation, and making survivors out of victims – the real heroes of the emergency medical community!
