Flight Nurse Interview Needed. . .PLEASE

TraumaNurse · Dec 4, 2004

Well, I gave up flight nursing a couple of years ago and am now in CRNA school, but I can answer some of your questions.

1. I was a flight nurse for about 2 years.

2. 9 years trauma/surgical ICU mostly but also ER and MICU.

3. At the time, I chose to be a flight nurse because it is challenging, requires high level of skill, has a great deal of autonomy and it's really fun to fly!

4. I loved the excitment of landing a helicopter on a street and dealing with whatever we met. I loved the ability to think, make decisions and act on them based on my own judgement. I loved the advanced skills you get to use such as intubations and other advanced airway techniques.

5. Flying in an EMS helicopter is fun, but dangerous. When I had young children, I began to think about what would happen to them if I did not make it back. Once you let that kind of thinking in your head, the job becomes very difficult. Flight nursing also requires you to maintain a lot of classes and seminars that require extra time outside of regular working hours. My flight program also had mandatory on-call which really cuts into your personal life.

6. Our team had 2 fixed wing aircraft and a rotor. The rotor did almost all scene work with a few inter-hospital transports and the fixed wing obviously did all IHTs. Of our 2000+ flights/year, over half were scene responses.

7. One of the most important things for flight nursing is experience. The more experience in a level 1 trauma ER or ICU the better. Beyond experience, it is important to attend as many classes/courses as possible and to get as many certifications as you can. Flight nurses care for people from all ages, so it is important to have varying classes such as ACLS, PALS, TNCC, ENPC, NRP etc. A national certification such as CCRN or CEN is highly recommended and may be required by many flight programs. Also, many flight programs will require nurses to become EMT-B or even EMT-P.

8. Flight nursing is critical care nursing. It is different because you have to be able to make split second decisions on your own with little guidance. Most nurses must wait for a doc to tell them what to do. Flight nurses work under medical protocols and often cannot wait to ask someone what to do next. There is also more physical risk in flight nursing than any other type of nursing.

9. Flight nurses (as well as other nurses) burn out from physical and emotional stress. Flight nursing is very physically demanding and strenuous on your body (lifting heavy patients for large distances, aircraft vibrations, pressure changes and O2 level changes, noise polution etc). A flight nurse will witness and experience trauma and sickness that most people cannot even fathom. It takes a mentally strong person to deal with all that.

To avoid burn out in flight nursing it is important to stay physically and mentally fit. Excercise, good diet and plenty of rest for physical health and good stress management for all the emotional stress. The better coping mechanisms you have (humor, meditation etc), the less likely you will burn out. This is true of every nursing profession.

10. A good flight nurse thrives on excitement, is physicall and mentally fit, has great coping skills, loves to learn and be challenged, enjoys autonomy and the ability to make appropriate decisions. A smart, educated, and experienced, thrill seeker!

Anyway, I hope this helps a little. Hopefully, you will get a response from someone who is still flying! At the time I left, I had my personal reasons, but I have missed it a lot and if I did not get accepted into anesthesia school, I probably would have gone back to flight nursing.