CALSTAR nonprofit air ambulance service is organization of the
year
Gilroy – To most nurses, it sounds like a nightmare: A flying emergency room, not much bigger than a broom closet, hurtling through a gusty night. CALSTAR’s air ambulance service packs emergency-room essentials into the belly of a helicopter, and dispatches them to disaster. Flight nurses plug wounds and prod patients toward life – all while pilots navigate wind, rain and unlikely landing zones, to get patients to trauma centers within the so-called “golden hour.” They’ve got to think quick. From mid-air, you can’t get a second opinion.
Still, flight nurse J.D. Phipps loves this job. It’s stressful, and the hours aren’t great – 24-hour shifts, with catnaps interrupted by calls. Injured patients fight, gag and clench their teeth as nurses try to save them. And yeah – you’re not going to rake in the dough.
“This is not a business you go into to get rich,” said program manager Michael Baulch, who worked 16 years as a CALSTAR flight nurse. Baulch recently replaced Tom Goff, who he credits with Gilroy CALSTAR’s success. “The only way to become a millionaire, in this industry, is to start with $2 million.”
But then, CALSTAR isn’t about cash. The nonprofit absorbs the cost of flying uninsured or under-insured patients. At $15,000 a flight, that’s a deal. For members – families can join for $45 a year – the service is all-but-free. The only thing a member pays is the deductible. And when hikers go missing in the Santa Cruz Mountains, CALSTAR searches the hills for free.
“When they take off, they have no idea if a patient can pay or not,” said Vivian Smith, vice-president of Saint Louise Regional Hospital, which maintains a heliport and on-site housing for CALSTAR’s pilots and nurses. “They serve everybody, regardless of their ability to pay.”
That doesn’t mean that CALSTAR works on the cheap. Baulch wants top-of-the-line trauma equipment and helicopters, and is trying to scrape together enough money for pilots’ night-vision goggles.
“We’re under no illusions that any of this is done cheaply,” he said, “and we wouldn’t want to.”
This month, Gilroy’s Chamber of Commerce dubbed CALSTAR its Organization of the Year, an honor it’s only given once before, to the Garlic Festival. For rural and semi-rural areas, the service is a vital link to big-city trauma centers, which can take twice the time to reach via highways.
“From day one, CALSTAR came into Gilroy wanting to be a community partner,” said Susan Valenta, CEO of Gilroy’s Chamber of Commerce. “They provide 24/7 life-saving air ambulance transport, a service that means the difference between life and death.”
That’s the big stuff. But CALSTAR has done the little things, too: flying over a Veteran’s Day celebration at Rebekah Children’s Center, appearing in parades, breakfast meetings, and trade shows, and meeting and greeting everyone in Gilroy, from business owners to police.
Of the company’s eight Northern California bases, Gilroy is one of the oldest, established here in 1993. It’s also one of the busiest, fielding up to 60 flights a month. The highways that thread through South County deliver a steady stream of emergency calls to the “Batphone” in CALSTAR’s living quarters: a direct line to 911 operators that announces each emergency call. From the tiny house, ensconced behind a trailer near the parking lot of Saint Louise Hospital, pilots and flight nurses peel out, abandoning showers, meals and naps. The base serves “four-and-a-half counties,” said Phipps: Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San Benito, Monterey and part of Merced.
Nurses try to keep their feelings at arm’s length, but it’s hard, said Baulch. After difficult flights, nurses and pilots gather for a Critical Incident Stress Debriefing: a fancy name for talking it out. Nobody can completely scuttle their emotions, especially when survivors still call to thank nurses and pilots.
“People will walk up to me at air shows and say, ‘You flew me. You flew my son,'” Baulch said. Even under trauma, “they’ll remember your face, or maybe something you said.”
Valenta said she can’t reveal who nominated CALSTAR, but the honor shows: They didn’t forget, either.
“When the community comes forward with this nomination,” she said, “that’s the greatest form of appreciation that someone can show.”
