SOUTHEAST NURSE CREDITED WITH FIRST EMS `COPTER' FLIGHT

The 48-year-old Carbondale, Ill., man had fallen at home and suffered a head injury.

When he needed surgery, staff at Carbondale's Doctors Memorial Hospital put the patient into a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter along with a nurse and a pilot and the patient was flown to Springfield, Ill., for surgery.

That flight, which took place on Feb. 8, 1972, was the first documented civilian incident in which a nurse accompanied a patient on a helicopter EMS run.

The nurse was Joy Goodman, now a flight nurse with Southeast Missouri Hospital's LifeBeat air ambulance service.

"We didn't have any problems with this patient," Goodman said. "He had surgery but died afterward. He had a subdural hematoma."

It wasn't a happy start to a new chapter in emergency medical services but it was an important one.

"That kind of set the stage and showed us that there was something we could do, even though we had not saved his life," Goodman said.

Since then, Goodman, now 65, has been on hundreds of flights, some transporting patients from hospital to hospital, some from the scenes of accidents to emergency rooms.

Using helicopters to transport patients was nothing new when Illinois started organizing its trauma program in 1971. Doctors sometimes accompanied patients on flights, and the U.S. military had been using helicopters for medical transports since the Korean War.

But the flight Goodman was on was the first that took place as part of an integrated care-delivery system, and air ambulance services now operate worldwide.

Goodman started nursing in 1971. She had been working in the intensive care unit at Doctors Memorial when she was picked to be trained for the new program.

She then became the regional nurse coordinator for Illinois in a region that served 29 hospitals.

In the early days, the nurse, pilot and patient headed into the wild blue yonder without many of the amenities now common.

"In those days we could only talk to the airport at Springfield, because they had radio communication and they would radio the hospitals and tell them we were coming in," she said. "Soon after that the hospitals themselves got radios, but that took a while, and then the rural hospitals got radios."

Air ambulance services have also become much more autonomous, she said, with their own dispatchers and bases, all usually housed at hospitals.

"We have a system now. The ground ambulance people can call us directly from the scene. People can call us directly from the hospital and tell us where they want us to take the patient," Goodman said. "And now we have a full flight crew. There's a nurse, the pilot and a paramedic. We didn't have paramedics when I started. It was just me and the pilot. And now the dispatchers make contact with us every 15 minutes, so if we go down somebody always knows where we are."

There are also places for the helicopter to land now, she said. When she worked in Illinois and transported patients to Chicago, it wasn't unusual for the chopper to land at Midway airport, where a ground ambulance would transfer the patient to the hospital.

"When we'd go to Barnes (Hospital in St. Louis), we used to land in Forest Park, and the patient would be transferred by ambulance to the hospital," she said.

Goodman came to Southeast Missouri Hospital in 1987 when the hospital started its own air ambulance service.

"But I didn't make the first flight here," she said.

LifeBeat handles about 600 calls annually and is one of 10 air ambulance services licensed to operate in Missouri. In 1994, air ambulances made 8,039 flights statewide.

Goodman has lectured throughout the U.S. and in the Soviet Union and Guatemala on establishing air ambulance services.

A flight nurse once wrote a song called "Dancing with the Angels," she said, "and that's what we feel like we're doing up there."

Nursing is nursing, Goodman said, whether it's on the ward, in the emergency room or up in the helicopter.

"I believe in holding a hand, and I really believe in the wet washcloth," she said. "Some people would say, she's just an old nurse, but you would be surprised at what it can do. The human touch has not left the nursing field by any means."

Goodman lives in Makanda Township, Ill.