Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, the Northern Colorado MedEvac team stands ready to fly. This is their team, and these are their stories.
From their humble beginnings in Greeley Colorado to now covering almost the entire of the state and beyond, Northern Colorado MedEvac has served its community and more for over thirty years. With three aircraft located in Greeley, Akron, and Boulder Colorado, Northern Colorado MedEvac is able to provide service anywhere within a 300 square mile radius. It was with this incredible team that I was able to spend six weeks documenting the many different facets of operation that come together to provide care for the hundreds of patients every year who rely on the unmatched speed of helicopter medical transportation.
While working as a MedEvac Paramedic might seem like a constant adrenaline rush, as it turns out, most of the time that's not the case. Averaging only about one flight a day, much of one's shift is spent waiting for a call to come in. As they like to put it, "we aren't paid for what we do, we're paid for what we are trained to do." As in any medical field, flight paramedics and nurses aren't sure what illness or injury they will face that day, rather the thousands of hours invested each year into learning new treatments, equipment and procedures. It is from all this training that when a call eventually does come in, every member of the team can provide the best possible care when it is most crucial.
MedEvac
In theory, the concept of medical transportation is a simple one. You get hurt, you call 911, you get transported by either an ambulance or a helicopter to a hospital, you get better, you go home. Rinse and repeat. However, as I came to learn, this is far from the case in the majority of situations. In the same sense that you can either hail a taxi, request an Uber or order a Lyft depending on convenience, price and personal preference, emergency services have a variety of medical transportation options to choose from. There is no "generic" air ambulance provider that emergency services call upon in your hour of need. Instead, the reality is a complicated network of overlapping and competing medical air transportation services owned by different companies all vying for your business. It is within this circle of competition that Northern Colorado MedEvac operates, and advertises itself. For them, public outreach is about more than just informing the public, it's about influencing potential clients to chose their service over that of their competitors.
