Children’s Hospital of Michigan PANDA One Helicopter Takes Flight
Dec 15, 2021Children’s Hospital of Michigan has added a new service to their PANDA ONE Transport Team: the PANDA One helicopter is now taking flight, to help better serve patients.
PANDA One in Michigan’s only fully-dedicated pediatric and neonatal air and ground ambulance service.
”The real benefit is being able to do more with less,” said Robert Schultz, a nurse on the transport team. “Being able to get to more faster, means that we can do more calls and get more calls down to the hospital.”
Each year, the PANDA One team transports more than 1,200 patients from hospitals throughout surrounding states and Ontario.
”It’s basically an extension of our services that we already offer,” said Schultz. “We’ve always been a dedicated neonatal and pediatric transport team, but this is just allowing us to mobilize farther and get back to the hospital quicker, and just be able to reach more kids and help them to get down to the definitive care they need.”
The helicopter is based at the Flint Bishop Airport, in order to help with response times in Saginaw and Genesee Counties.
”The real benefit I see, is for the kids that live farther away from Detroit that need the specialist at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan,” said Schultz. “They’ll be able to get downtown quicker and they won’t have to drive on the Michigan roads to get there because there’s no pot holes in the air.”
Schultz says their goal is to eventually get an airplane to help complete even more missions.
”It’s something that we’ve been striving for, for a long time,” he said. “ To be able to get this program “up in the air,” so to speak, because it’s the national progression of where our programs going to go.”