Observations of an experienced ICU nurse and long-time AJN blogger who recently made the transition to flight nursing.

Marcy Phipps, BSN, RN, CCRN, ATCN, TNCC, is an occasional contributor to this blog. Some details have been changed to protect patient privacy.

“We’ve been married for 58 years,” my patient’s wife says. “Fifty-eight years…”

She turns her attention from me and gazes out the window of the plane.

We are on a medevac flight, 35,000 feet over the Pacific en route to an urban, American hospital near “home.” Her husband is being transferred to receive aggressive care for a grave illness.

We collected him hours earlier from a hospital on a foreign island. Local paramedics picked my partner and me up from the barren, windy tarmac. As we sped to the hospital in the back of an ambulance with a cracked windshield, the driver turned to warn us that we were going to “the worst hospital in the city.”

“It’s open-air,” he told us, as he dodged mopeds and swerved through narrow, crowded streets.

This didn’t surprise me. I’d been forewarned that hospital conditions on many of these remote islands could be shocking when compared to American standards. It was something I’d been curious to see firsthand.

Yet when we picked our patient up, we found him in a small and clean room in an intensive care unit. Despite the paramedic’s prediction […]