Airplane ambulance flight caps active shooter drill for Palo Pinto General Hospital team
Jun. 19—MINERAL WELLS — The second phase of a three-part active shooter drill at Palo Pinto General Hospital was capped Thursday by a unique patient transport.
"They call it an Ambulance in the Sky," said Tammy Gibson, business director for a medical airplane transport that's worked with the hospital in Mineral Wells for the past several years. "We transport trauma patients from rural hospitals to the big hospitals like Baylor, M.D. Anderson and (Cook) Children's."
Medical Air Rescue Co. has flown patients since the 1980s and can overcome obstacles that ground helicopters cannot.
"It gives them another option in a mass injury accident," MARC Director of Operations Dustin Hunsaker said. "Palo Pinto (General) has an air evacuation helicopter here that does most of their transports. When the weather's down and the helicopters can't fly, we can still fly."
The Beechcraft KingAir C90 waiting on the tarmac at Mineral Wells Regional Airport offers a heated or cooled patient cabin equipped for video laryngoscopy, defibrillation, ECG measurements, pulse resuscitation and other life-saving processes found in Mobile Intensive Care Units.
"It's very important if we have a critical patient," Chief Nurse and Chief Quality Officer Sue Ellen Tabor said. "So, this is just a second line of defense for being able to get critical patients to appropriate places."
The hospital's drill had concluded well, Hudson said after a Sacred Cross EMS crew eased the actor/patient on a stretcher into the plane.
She said Phase 1 had been earlier in the year and had ended with capture of the shooter.
Mineral Wells Fire/EMS, police, Sacred Cross EMS and an Air Evac Lifeteam helicopter unit were listed participants in the drill.
"Stage 2 is the actual ER part of this," Hudson said. "So this is training for our ER."
Stage 3 will test the hospital's ability to let the public know when such real-time emergencies are happening.
And Stage 4 will combine all three into one replay.
"I think everybody learned something," Hunsaker said. "And we found some communication holes."
Nicole Hunsucker, the hospital's training coordinator, also awarded good grades to the drill.
"It went really well," she said. "We got a lot of participating entities. I do a monthly training and invite others to come and take back to their hospital."
Based in Rapid City, North Dakota, MARC has satellites in McKinney and Hugo, Oklahoma, as well as in Valentine, Nebraska.
