CommunityBrand SpotlightYour Healthy Family

Actions

Your Healthy Family: UCHealth's new mobile intensive care unit

Posted at 5:40 PM, Jul 16, 2019
and last updated 2023-02-23 11:17:43-05

Disclaimer: This is sponsored content. All opinions and views are of UCHealth and does not reflect the same of KOAA.

Freshly delivered from Florida, UCHealth’s LifeLine Transport services have a new state-of-the-art mobile intensive care unit that will soon be on duty in southern Colorado.

Nikki Couch is a Transport Respiratory Therapist with UCHealth LifeLine’s critical care transport team. Nikki explains that the new arrival has been long anticipated. “This has been a two-year project that has brought this ambulance to us.”

This is no regular ambulance; it’s a mobile intensive care unit that arrived in Colorado last Friday and officially goes into service next week.

Nikki says, “It will help bring critical care straight into our community and our outlying areas, allowing us to transport critical patients. It allows us to start critical care at the facility – at the community level - and bring (that patient) to the tertiary center, UCHealth Memorial Central Hospital - a Level I Trauma Center that is the busiest trauma center in the state at the moment.”

The mobile ICU ambulance won't respond to regular 9-1-1 calls but will be used to transport critically ill patients from facility to facility.

Nikki explains “All ambulances have the ability to offer basic life support or advanced life support depending on their qualifications; this is the only (ambulance) that allows critical care, which is advanced cardiac ICU care, and it brings that to the community.

It’s the medical professionals that staff this ICU ambulance and their ability to use the specialized equipment that allows stable intensive-level care while transporting patients from one place to another.

Nikki says, “It has advanced capabilities to lock in safety-wise some of these advanced pieces of equipment that sick patients need, like balloon pumps, impeller devices, advanced fetal cardiac, and fetal monitoring. We have the ability to lock all that (equipment) in a safe environment so that we can move it from one point to another and keep our patients very, very safe and by doing so, so we take the ICU to them.”

UCHealth is a proud sponsor of Your Healthy Family

KOAA News5 Mobile App

News5 Mobile App

About Brand Spotlight

Brand Spotlight offers useful, valuable information from select sponsors on these pages. This content is not produced or endorsed by this station.