Planned helipad would expedite local emergency response

WASILLA — If all goes according to plan, come spring air ambulances heading to Valley car wrecks and other emergency calls will have a much shorter trip.

Don Griffin, CEO of LifeMed Alaska, said the company plans to move its helicopters to Wolf Lake Airport, which sits between Trunk Road and Wasilla-Fishhook Road, north of Bogard Road.

LifeMed plans to keep its fixed-wing aircraft in Anchorage. But it has leased out hangar space and crew quarters and plans to start making helicopter flights from the Valley on March 1.

“The crew will live next to the hangar,” he said, facilitating late night call-outs.

He said that looking at the company’s call volume, moving to the Wolf Lake simply made sense.

“Our theory is we bring patients into Anchorage but we never take patients up to the Valley,” Griffin said. “So it makes more sense to have our aircraft at the scene of the wrecks.”

LifeMed is the company formed in November when Providence Alaska Medical Center’s Life Guard service merged with the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation’s Aero Med International. The company will serve the entire state, with the occasional medical call to respond to the Russian Far East.

Griffin said the Valley generates more calls than most regions in the state. The move, he said, will greatly shorten response times.

In the past, even though helicopters are capable of landing at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center, they didn’t do it very often.

Most of the time what hospital a patient goes it is based solely on what the industry calls “medical necessity.” Essentially, a patient is routed to the closest hospital that can treat them.

With the helicopters flying out of Anchorage, ambulances can usually get a patient to Mat-Su Regional faster than a helicopter could.

These days, then, the air ambulance is usually not called out unless the patient needs treatment unavailable at Mat-Su Regional – for example, trauma surgery.

But if the helicopters are closer at hand, medics in the Valley might be more likely to call for them.

“I think the volume will grow if we’re up there,” Griffin said. “A lot of these EMS [guys] will call us more readily if they know we’re right there.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.