Black Hills Life Flight adds life-saving whole blood to flights

RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) – When someone is experiencing a medical emergency it can be the seconds that matter the most, not the minutes.

To help save seconds, Black Hills Life Flight added whole blood to their air ambulances.

Black Hills Life Flight transports people having a medical emergency to the closest facility that can treat them. Recently, all Life Flight locations added whole blood to their transports with the aim of starting care faster.

“Absolutely having the whole blood and being able to provide that to the community just brings that link of that critical care capabilities of Black Hills Life Flight to bringing that ICU to the patient. Part of having that ICU is having that access to the whole blood to give to those patients,” said Darryl Crown, the account executive for Black Hills Life Flight.

The term whole blood refers to the state blood is in when it leaves someone’s body. It includes plasma, platelets, and of course red blood cells. Not only is whole blood better at helping people stop bleeding, it can be easier than transporting each of the elements in the blood separately.

“For us to be able to carry that one unit of whole blood is like carrying a unit of packed cells, a unit of plasma, a unit of platelets, and some cryoprecipitate all packed into one. So it’s very advantageous to someone who is bleeding,” said Jennifer Zettl, a flight nurse with Black Hills Life Flight.

Zettl recounts a time when having access to whole blood may have saved a patient’s life.

“‘And I said ‘We have a unit of whole blood with us would you like me to give it.?’ He’s like ‘What you have whole blood? Yeah, go ahead give it to him,’ and so we in transport gave that unit of blood through warmer, and by the time we got him to Rapid City we were able to get him off of his blood pressure medicine and his heart rate and blood pressure had stabilized a lot and it really seemed like that was an incredibly effective treatment for him,” said Zettl.

Crown expects that adding whole blood to these flights will save lives and help benefit the more than 1,000 people they serve annually.

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