By Mary Ann Roser
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Published: 9:45 p.m.
Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012
Travis County STAR Flight is basing crew members and one of its three medical helicopters at Dell Children's Medical Center to ease transport and care of critically ill or injured children, officials said Thursday.
Until last month, when the transition began, only one STAR Flight helicopter was hospital-based, at the publicly owned University Medical Center Brackenridge. The other two were kept at a hangar east of Dell Children's where one helicopter is kept out of services for maintenance, leaving the other two ready to fly, said Casey Ping, the service's program director.
Like Brackenridge, Dell Children's has a Level I trauma center, the highest level, serving the most critically sick and injured children in a 46-county region.
Being on site, STAR Flight paramedics will be able to collaborate more on research and training with hospital staffers, STAR Flight and hospital officials said. It also will be easier for STAR Flight to transport children's hospital nurses and doctors on flights to pick up a child, cutting out time to land at the hospital and retrieve staffers, when needed. That will save precious minutes, said Greg Hartman, an executive of the Seton Healthcare Family, which operates the hospital.
Initially, the helicopter will be at Dell Children's 12 hours a day — from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. But "it will become a 24-hour site in a very short time," said Hartman, also the president and CEO of Brackenridge.
In anticipation of that, officials celebrated a grand opening of the STAR Flight service at the hospital Thursday and touted on-site accommodations that feature 1,175 square feet dedicated to STAR Flight crew members, including three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, a communications room and storage for blood and medications.
"We can take blood out with us and administer it under a protocol established by those physicians" at Dell Children's, also saving time, Ping said.
Brackenridge has space dedicated to the paramedic crew, but it's being renovated, Seton officials said.
Seton paid for the accommodations at Dell Children's and contributed to the cost of the third helicopter when it was added to the fleet in 2010, Hartman said. He did not have amounts Thursday.
maroser@statesman.com; 445-3619
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