Interview With a Flight Nurse

hey guys my name's sam and welcome to prepmatic in this week's video we have wes who's the owner of x year he is also a flight nurse out in michigan so today we're going to be talking about his career path how he got to where he is and hopefully give you guys an idea if that's something you want to do wes thanks for coming out i really appreciate getting the chance to talk to you about this um you know it's kind of a different side to medicine the the nursing career and i've had a lot of questions of do i want to go paramedic do i want to go nurse and of course i tell them to go paramedic every single time but uh you know just having that other perspective i think is super valuable so can you kind of tell me what your background is and what your story is yeah thanks for having me i'm really glad to be here um yeah the whole paramedic nurse thing it goes it goes way back and i have the advantage of having both sides of that story but um yeah i started out when i was about 18. i didn't have a lot of exposure to emergency medicine my brother was a firefighter emt he's about 11 years older than me and so i you know remember riding around with him a little and and being around the station and stuff with him but i kind of wanted to do something in my community and so i signed up for a volunteer basic ems service in rural michigan and they sent me to emt school to local community college and so i started doing emt basic and really enjoyed it super green didn't know anything about anything youtube wasn't the thing back then so i didn't really even have much to watch so that got me started in emt basic and working on a volunteer rig did two semesters there got my emt license and was having a lot of fun with my classmates and my instructor and now everybody there really enjoyed that so i went into this emt specialist did that through the summer and then my community college did their first ever paramedic program and so i went right into that and just kind of one thing to another did the paramedic school and when my paramedic school finished the same community college they were trying to really get their kind of emergency service thing going and they did a paramedic to rn which are not too common a lot of people look for them and ask about it i know a lot of medics you know if they're considering doing something different looking at a career change we'll look at the paramedic to iron thing and now there's a few online i guess and there's still a smattering of programs across the country but that worked really well for me so basically the way my program worked we did a transition class over the summer so everything that is typically the first two semesters of nursing school you have intro to pharmacology med surg one all this kind of stuff is a six week block okay and so we did that ob farm all that stuff real quick and then we joined the third semester nursing students in the fall third fourth semester and then had my associates in nursing uh basically 18 months after i started the program didn't really set out to be a nurse when i started but i liked what i saw in emergency nursing uh at that time in the area i was working i discovered that if you wanted to support a family as a paramedic you were going to do it with a lot of overtime and unfortunately that's the reality in a lot of places still but it's gotten better since then this was back in 07 that i became a medic and so the nursing route was a little bit better for that so fresh out of school i went to texas got a job in brownsville texas at a emergency department there basically because it was kind of the job crash of 0-809 and they were looking for er nurses and moved me down there and i was single and up for an adventure so it was a good time right on the border right on the gulf of mexico it was it was really good learning experience my paramedic background definitely helped you know i've been a medic for a couple years at that time an emt for almost five years and so when you get thrown in kind of a really busy environment like that without a lot of experience as a nurse i relied on that background as a as an emt and a paramedic to make sure that at least i didn't didn't kill anybody or could recognize my sick patients so that helped i was down there for a couple years came back to michigan got a job at a level one trauma center peds trauma center burn center in michigan that was a really great place to work worked there almost five years before i was able to get my job in and hems helicopter ems where i am now so it was through my er job that i created next year and that's not what this is about but basically you know i was looking for a better trauma shear tool and tried different ones and when i was working in the er we we released that back in 2016 and then shortly after that i got a job at uh aircare where i work now so um we talked a little bit before you were talking about kind of the career path into flight nursing um you know there's there's a paramedic side there's a nursing side depends on the organization you work for how they function but at my organization we actually run dual nurse medics and so it's um it's unique there's not too many in the country that do that there are several but i love it because i get to kind of sit in both seats um we do the medications we do the airway you know everything is we operate um in both those roles traditionally the nurse would take more of the icu side so they're taking care of the meds and the infusions um maybe the assessment some of that stuff and then the flight paramedic would uh take air away and and more of that side more try to stay a little bit more within the the roles and the experiences of the two job categories so if you didn't do the bridge program if you were just going from nothing to your rn your associates in nursing how long would that generally take if you don't have prereqs that transfer over from your paramedics let's say you have just a certificate in paramedicine from you know eons ago um it's usually two years for an associate's degree so you're gonna have a solid probably more than that you're going to have at least three semesters of prerequisites maybe four and then you'll have the nursing program which is almost always two years and that's for an associate's degree which is pretty much a good place to start in most states um i have my bachelor's now i don't have anything against you know bachelor's prepared nurses it's a great way to go but if you're trying to feed your family you can get that associate's degree get started you know maybe make a little bit more money and then work on your bsn online i know the hospital i used to work with in iowa used to have they'd hire you as an rn but then in like a three-year term they required you to get your bsn but the nice thing about that was is that then they'd pay those nurses to do it so you'd pay for your associates and then the hospital system would just pay for everything else which seemed like a good way to go that's pretty common um yeah the hospital i worked at was that way as well you had to at least be enrolled in a program within so many years there was some tuition reimbursement if you were full-time a lot of organizations want that i think it helps with magnet status and various hospital verification and just you know it promotes um kind of ongoing education and stuff with their staff so where do you see the big difference between you know paramedic and nursing because i feel like a lot of times the two professions are kind of um compared side by side because it's similar levels of training um and it's similar scopes of practice when you look at it but you know i think there's a lot of people kind of trying to decide which one they're doing so how would you characterize the difference between the two having both those educational backgrounds that's a good question and it's interesting because you see um some degree of i don't say animosity but it is sometimes and sometimes it's a friendly rivalry and other times it's it's less friendly or it's somewhat passive-aggressive having done both there is certainly some differences and if you've only done one it i can see how it's somewhat challenging to completely understand the other one so for a nurse that finished nursing school maybe worked in med surg or icu for a few years came down to er to understand the environment that pre-hospitals operating in you know where they're stabilizing this patient just trying to you know get an iv while they're bumping down the road and get the best you know couple drugs in they can or whatever and the amount of time they have you know call and report all the different things they have going on for a potentially brief amount of time and then they bring them in and it's it's challenging maybe for them to understand some of the barriers and some of the situations that the pre-hospital deals with and i think that's partly where some of those um attitudes or misunderstandings um some of that comes from and then ems you know if you if you walk in and and you see everybody at the nurse's station charting and nobody looks at you you're wheeling into the room or whatever like it's you know i i've seen both sides of that i definitely have and i understand some of that but in reality the scopes are pretty similar you know ems is not cowboys out there doing whatever they want you know they're driven by a set of protocols they have basically their orders have already been given and if you get this you do this you know through their protocols and with nursing you generally have a physician there writing those orders and not always sometimes we'll put protocols in and when i worked in the in the hospital i tried to maintain a really good rapport with the docs and um you know we worked together and if you had a patient that needed something i didn't feel like i was hindered by the physicians from caring for the patient you would um you know reach out to them they'd put an order in you suggest something if you felt like your patient needed something you could advocate for them it was a great collaboration i never felt like being a nurse i was you know less free to provide patient care or to initiate you know advocate take care of my patients then as a paramedic i i always really felt like it it went well in the hospital working together with the docs and i've always enjoyed that relationship both pre-hospital and in the hospital so who would you like somebody going into the medical field you're looking for something to do and you know you want to be a helper you know you want to be in that kind of environment so comparing like an emergency nurse to a paramedic at this point what kind of a person would you say i think you should probably go into nursing as opposed to i think paramedicine is the way to go for you or or would you even would you just suggest one over the other all the time i wouldn't suggest one over the other all the time i do think nursing you have a bit more opportunity to to go different places if something doesn't work out um it gives you a lot of ability to go into critical care to go into er if you want to go work in you know outpatient surgery and have your nine to five no holidays no weekends you know there's there's all these different things you can kind of do with it and you can start in the kind of fast paced and then move your way to something else if you want later in your career path and so that's pretty nice ems doesn't always offer that opportunity as much there's certainly folks out there that have jobs in ems be it you know doing health insurance or life insurance exams or things like that where you can you can get a different gig that takes you off the road you're not lifting patients and doing things like that um as far as like personality types or or things like that the probably the pre-hospital crowd is a bit rougher your patient care is going to be a little bit more raw you're dealing with the motor vehicle scenes and all that kind of stuff whereas in the er it's a lot of the same thing but it's a bit more structured and a bit more controlled and so i guess if you really don't know which way to go try to understand both look at you know how important is income to you how important is work in 8 to 12 versus twenty fours or all the different uh things what the agencies do in your area um and then spend some time with them you know you can usually job shadow a nurse you can use your job shadow on an ambulance talk to folks i'm always a big fan of getting to know the people a little bit if you can i guess i've known like in my career every time that i go to do something and any like major advancement i've made in my career hasn't really been because of my qualifications my qualifications get me in the door but then having those relationships with people and the right person giving you that endorsement absolutely um into it is has been the biggest thing for me um of just knowing the right people and making those connections and i think generally just not being an [ __ ] in your daily life you're kind of talked about like the animosity between nurses and paramedics and i worked in a hospital-based system i worked with a lot of nurses and we definitely had our times we poked fun at each other and stuff but uh you know i think the thing is is that they're two different professions and for me i guess i've noticed that it's two different job sets even though they might deal with the same patient you know you have the paramedic and you can stop me if i i'm saying anything wrong with it or that you don't see it from that perspective but you have ems in the field you have the patient it stabilize and it's moving and it sees something do something and you're it there's there's no other help except for a helicopter periodically but when you get and you kind of just do what you can what you have and then you get to the hospital and you know the nursing staff takes over and you have all of these specialists and specialty units and tests and they can take a more nuanced approach and while there's not quite as much autonomy in that space there's a lot more depth to everything you're doing and you know you get that follow-up where an ems it's a lot of times it's dropped them off at the door i hope for the best and we're going to take off and get a sandwich from a break room on the way out um but that's like for me that's been the biggest thing and just understanding that they're different jobs and not comparing the two a ton like we're comparing them right now but not in a uh jealous way now i will say that i've found ems i think nursing is a very old career you know it's it's something that's been going on for a while and in the last 20 years has really kind of found its feet as a profession and as a really specialized skill set for people whereas ems has about half the time or quarter of the time of nursing does so i i agree with you i think that you can definitely make more nursing but in my experience you know i've made a good living off it and i found that a lot more places are starting to up that no in the i mean in the 15 years i've been in the business it's changed significantly in my area you know as far as you know other areas or if you're firebased or all these different things there's there's definitely so i don't think money is the bottom line i think kind of understand what you want to go into it for a little bit the flexibility you can bridge from one to another you know you can go work in ems and go on and become a physician or different things like that and i think i have never regretted for a minute the foundation of ems um i think to become uh even a medical first responder or an emt basic and to spend some time on an ambulance is a great life skill no matter what you do with yourself so i would i would never discourage someone from that you know if it was a family member i'd be like yeah get ready for some rough crowds you know that's there's uh there's a type that we've all met and um it's becoming less it's becoming more professional um but it takes a certain type of person to do that most of us are a little bit you know and a little bit drama junkie or whatever terms you want to call it like we i always say enjoy's the wrong word but that's what we train for and so when you get in those situations is something that that um we like to do and so either you like that or you don't and if that's something that you think you would do well at it's not necessarily a reason to get into it most people hopefully get into it wanting to help people for either profession i always tell people you have to want to take care of people to make yourself as good as you can be to always be learning and have something more than just i want to pay check and it seems like you know it seems like ems is a good way because you work 24 hours and you sleep six hours if you're in a you know in a less busy system or nursing it's a you know an associate's degree that can you know make you x amount of money you have to want it and nursing is is very challenging i've met you know salty old medics that went back to nursing school and i was like what is this you know that was very challenging um paramedic school can also be very very challenging but it's very different and the school is very different you know i will say that um paramedic school you know like you get in and you do a little a p or not i was thinking emt basic school little amp and then you're like backboarding people and hold them upside down and like super hands-on really lends itself to the to the um well the kind of 80d or that kind of personality type that likes the hands-on learning is ready to do stuff paramedic obviously you get more into pharmacology and cardiology and all that kind of stuff which which i really enjoyed you know all that as well but nursing for the first little bit you're you know you're learning these detailed assessments and old school nursing because it is a very traditional um career path you have this these nursing assessments and um you know even things like how you make a bed and all these things that how you roll a patient and wound care and dressing changes and stuff that is very important and very important to be done right but to an ems mind is can be challenging so that was that was some of the stuff i never really stopped learning from when i started emt basic until i was a nurse was basically a five-year path that i was in school the whole time so it wasn't as challenging for me but if you're a more seasoned ems provider looking to go back to nursing school you just have to be ready to kind of deal with that and put up with a little bit of stuff that you might not see the value in uh in order to to get through the program yeah dropping your ego i've noticed a lot of people like going back to nursing school they're unable to kind of drop that i i was intubating in the field yesterday i don't need to know how to make a bed but you know i'll be honest i prob i can't even make my own bed right so like that would be a skill i definitely need to learn right um how about hems specifically so if you're um either and i know you've probably been involved in the hiring process of the paramedic side or at least know of it in that regard so if you were looking either from a nurse or a paramedic perspective and that was your goal is to get onto a helicopter what could somebody do to prepare themselves in that realm you've alluded to a couple things earlier um you talked about kind of the continued learning you talked about just being a nice person and looking for those opportunities and building those relationships i think that's really important i think doing the job you have now as well as you possibly can you know never stop learning make sure that you're engaging with people um try to get to know people that are in the whatever job you want to do that's just kind of good practice network with um either using tools online but really face to face like if you know somebody in your facility is working with with him you know maybe they cross and work in the er ii um you know get to know him a little bit ask him some questions interact a little bit helicopter ems is very tight-knit close crews um maybe a little bit too much sometimes but you really collaborate as a team you know when you're in the back of a of an ambulance it's very important but usually kind of the paramedic takes care of them while you're in the way of the hospital in the back of a helicopter you always have the two providers you're back and forth that paramedic nursing if you're a nurse medic crew it's really important you don't have any of that left like you've got to be able to operate seamlessly and and um work back and forth so i think it's really really important like you can't understate the importance of just being a team oriented check your ego know your own kind of personality your own limitations and and to operate as a team my medical director during my hiring interview you know i was super nervous studying up on all my drugs and drips and all this kind of stuff and there was that you know usual conversations about that stuff but at one point he was like we can teach you know if you're willing to learn we can teach you any of the critical care stuff that you might be limited what we need to know is how you're going to function as part of this team and how you operate under pressure and stuff like that so be self-aware know how you operate in that capacity other than that um i always tell people to try to network i recommend teaching some classes i think it looks good on a resume and it's a really good experience even if it's you know whatever level you're at um it can be an american heart you know cpr class acls piles i teach for the ena as a nurse i teach their um tncc and enpc which is where nursing classes for emergency nurses but that just it looks really good on a resume but it also gives you a lot of interaction um and those classes are changing i know pals and acls kind of change their format there's less face time in those classes than there used to be but um it used to be you know everybody in the system comes through those classes and it's a good way to to collaborate with you know maybe the people that are going to be hiring you or going to be in on your interviews or things like that um an advanced certification is great if you go into it some of them require it so fpc um cfrn cn if you're an er nurse uh what are the some of the critical care emt from the transport ones all of those they're good they're great just to learn it makes you get into a book it makes you work on advancing your education but then it also really helps on a resume just things to set you apart and you have to be a little bit lucky there's just not that many jobs out there and so that's where if you if you know the people ahead of time if you get some good references it goes back to being a nice person but if you work with folks and they can vouch for you and you build a list of references that are maybe mutually known by where you're going so if you have you know docs and nurses as your references that are going to be known by the people that are interviewing you um that really helps too that's something i tried to do when i got my job um i had you know great people that were willing to to vouch for me and they were all kind of mutual colleagues of of the folks that were doing my interviews so i think that helped a lot too you said something earlier that i thought was interesting and something that um i've seen a lot of providers so we work in our 911 system we have emt's paramedics and there's this misconception that the schooling makes the provider and what i found and you alluded to it was that if you're a bad emt you're going to be a bad paramedic if you're a bad cna you're going to be a bad nurse and i think there's this pride or the lack of pride in these lower certified lower certifications the more basic certifications and they think well i'm i'm smarter than this i can go on i'm going to do more and then they get to that point and they real they don't have the fundamentals down they don't have the base because they don't in like emt to paramedic you know this they don't re-teach you the basics they assume you're already a competent amt and you know all these things and if you don't yeah you're learning a drip but you don't understand when that's going to be applied or what kind of patient it's going to be i don't know how to do the assessment to determine if you need it or yeah i really i place a tremendous amount of value on the continuum of of the patient care i genuinely try to appreciate you know the housekeeping and er techs that i worked with and you know crnas and um the emt basic mfr firefighters you know i worked for a basic service where we had an mfr in an emt basic typically when i was starting out or or a firefighter jumps in the ambulance to drive and and the mfr and the basic are in the back helping with the patient and we als intercept on the way in um so that's kind of where it came from and and i really really appreciate the scope and i don't think anybody ever needs to feel like they're inadequate because of their current level i think take pride in where you're at function to the best of your ability don't go out of scope you know you can learn all you can but stay and stay in scope know your limitations because that's a whole nother thing you know if you're trying to trying to act as a paramedic when you're when you're not um but take pride in where you're at learn it master it to the best of your ability and if you do that at every level you're going to be recognized and you're going to be great because a lot of people don't you know complacency sets and you just don't want to work that hard whatever but yeah you're exactly right if you if you care enough to be great as a basic you're going to be a good medic and you're going to do well and you'll be recognized because you know any anytime you you function to the best of your ability uh people will notice tell me about what you're doing with xsheer and kind of what motivated you to start that for those who you that might not have seen the video um i've actually uh did a review on these quite a while back and i actually bought these because i was looking for something a little bit lighter than uh the leatherman so what what kind of prompted you to start this company and what are you doing with it now yeah so i was working and in a level one trauma center when we kind of came up with the idea and weeb is my father-in-law who's a experienced product designer i wanted to kind of collaborate with him i sort of had an idea of running a side business and and building building something else and i decided the best way to do that was just to look for something that that i wanted to use i think most of the time the best innovation comes out of a need that you understand you know if someone's looking to build or to educate or anything like that pick something that you feel like you wish you had or you wish you knew better and so that's where the idea came from i was carrying the raptors didn't like having to clean them didn't like how heavy they were they weren't really comfortable to use i didn't need all the extra capabilities as an er nurse didn't wasn't using that and so that's where the idea of the next year was born just clean simple good scissors and so that's what we're doing now i still work full-time as a flight nurse love it not going anywhere it's a great job but exterior has kind of continued to grow and we have a lot of folks that use them that really like them so we're really blessed and and we enjoy providing the product i enjoy taking care of the customers that reach out and you know warranty work or anything like that it's fun kind of taking care of the profession that i love i love ems and i love um emergency health care and so it's just a simple thing it's just a trauma shear but when you're trying to cut someone out of clothing and you have yeah and you have one that's not working and someone gives you one that works great it's a big deal and so it's been fun it's been a fun brand to grow and um you know i appreciate folks like you that kind of early on gave us gave us some kind words and i like to support the community however i can absolutely so that's about all we have for this video today if you guys have any questions um i haven't talked to him about it but i'm going to volunteer wes he's going to monitor the comments a little bit before the start of this video so if you guys have any questions about that nursing side a great time to ask them down in the comments and we'll try to get those answered for you there's a lot of resources out there too you know there's facebook pages dedicated to uh providers that want to go into flight or um you know other resources for folks trying to pick a career path you know into nursing repair medicine this is just a little bit of my my perspective and my story is different than a lot of people's but absolutely yeah so i'll try to link some of those down below for you guys um to check out for kind of that path and uh some of the resources that you can recommend to me there uh like i said if you have any questions leave them down below and i will see you next week so you

Channel: PrepMedic

Views: 27,142

Rating: 4.964179 out of 5

Keywords: Flight Nurse, Nurse, HEMS, RN, BSN, MSN, Paramedic, Flight Paramedic, HElicopter, EMS, EMT, Medic

Id: usTzTnjGao0

Length: 30min 11sec (1811 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020