For nurses,
it’s all up in
the air
Flying Nurses helps ill
By Helen Altonn
and injured patients to
get back home
Star-BulletinA Kauai resident paralyzed from a diving accident wanted to go to a Baltimore rehabilitation hospital after being treated at the Queen's Medical Center.
A Boston man hospitalized on New Zealand's South Island while vacationing with his wife needed to get back home.
An elderly Honolulu woman had to be moved to a nursing home closer to her daughter in Oregon after a stroke.
Enter Amy Bosich and her Flying Nurses of Hawaii. Or, perhaps soon, Flying Nurses of the Pacific, since she's been asked to expand her medical travel service to Seattle and southeast Alaska.
"What makes our service unique is that it's comprehensive," Bosich said. "It's really risky out there. You have to assume something will go wrong, then what do you do? We've had a couple of cases where patients deteriorated."
Flying Nurses arranges for patients' ground and air transportation, layover assistance, medicine and any special equipment that may be needed, such as a stretcher, oxygen or ventilators.
Once a doctor says a patient is medically able to travel, Flying Nurses meets with them to establish a travel plan, Bosich said.
"It's really stressful," she said. "Families are overwhelmed with the whole process. We say not to worry -- just pack your bags."
Bosich came here in 1989 from San Diego as a traveling nurse. She worked part-time in the Queen's trauma unit and also flew for Hawaii Air Ambulance. She worked about six years as an occasional nurse escort for patients.
"I got more involved in planning trips for people. I saw a need there," she said. "At the end of 1995, I said, 'This is the time.' "Her growing business now has 22 critical-care registered nurses on-call 24 hours a day to provide "bed-to-bed" travel assistance. All have medical malpractice insurance.
Bosich flies, as well as three other coordinators, and still works two days a week at Queen's.
"My role is like the hub of a wheel," she explained. "I utilize other health care professionals." She works with doctors, therapists and nurses to evaluate a patient -- "how we can get them home" -- and prepares the patient for the trip.
A private air ambulance from here to the West Coast costs $21,000, Bosich said, while her cost ranges from $900 to $6,000.
Most of it is for air fare, she said, noting nine airline seats must be put down for a stretcher kit. She tries to save families money by ticketing patients in first-class seats if they can sit up for landings and takeoffs, she said.
About 80 percent of the patients are tourists -- perhaps injured in water or traffic accidents or stricken with illness, she said. The nurses also provide a "companion service" for elderly residents who want to visit families elsewhere.
Travel insurance companies turn to Flying Nurses for help when clients are ill and stranded. The outfit has made many trips to Japan and moved a lot of patients from Korea, Guam, the Philippines and Singapore, Bosich said.
They've also had calls from Africa and Greece. "The beeper goes off and you've got to drop everything."
For example, an insurance company called at 4 p.m. one day about a suicidal patient on Maui who had been on a cruise ship. She had mixed her medicines and was leaning over the ship's rail, Bosich said. "They thought she was going to jump."
Her family took her to a hospital on Maui, then left her in a hotel after she was discharged and returned to the ship, Bosich said.
"We had to get a nurse on Maui and fly her out by 8 p.m. I was scrambling. I had three other trips that day."
Flying Nurses arranged a van to take the woman to the airport and a nurse with a medical bag flew there from Oahu to meet her, Bosich said.
The nurse first talked the patient through a flying phobia and then escorted her home to Connecticut with two stopovers, she said. "When you get to the destination, you really feel protective of them."
Bosich recalled another patient from Taiwan who was in her 70s and had a massive stroke while visiting family here. The family said her soul would be lost if she didn't die at home, Bosich said.
"She was comatose, with a breathing tube, barely hanging on," she said. "We got her there. She died in 23 hours. The family was so thankful. She needed to be in her homeland."
Bosich herself, responding to a travel insurance company, went to Majuro in the Marshall Islands to pick up a 92-year-old woman who had fractured her hip on a cruise around the world.
She brought the woman here for orthopedic treatment, and then took her to a hospital in San Diego, her hometown, so she could be close to her twin sister.
Flying Nurses has a stack of appreciative letters from patients and families.
"It's a good service," Bosich said. "I feel good about it."
Johnna Hickox was living in Portland, Ore., when her mother, a Honolulu resident, had a stroke and couldn't walk. 'I just left it in their hands'
An only child, Hickox wanted to get her mother to a nursing home in Portland, but she didn't know how to do it until she learned of Flying Nurses of Hawaii from Queen's Medical Center.
A flying nurse took her mother to Portland in April. Then in July, Hickox said, she and her husband had to move to New York and she looked for a similar service on the mainland. "There wasn't anything that compared. I called Amy.
"She's always great about facilitating anything, making arrangements. She's very detailed, very caring, and all her people are, too. They really care for their patients. It isn't just a job with them.
"You're already stressed out to the max about the situation you're in. At least this is being taken care of. I just left it in their hands.
"They arrange for oxygen on board. They take care of all meds, monitor the patient, provide IV services and any other services they need. They coordinate with doctors on both ends on medical needs. Then they take them.
"The responsibility is tremendous and they step right up to it."
"We had more fun," said Gordon Hubbard, 75, recalling a trip from New Zealand to Boston with Flying Nurse's Amy Bosich. 'She could make
anybody well, that girl'Called by a travel insurance company, Bosich went to Christchurch to accompany Hubbard to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Hubbard and his wife, Kitty, of Duxbury, Mass., were touring the South Island when he was hospitalized with pneumonia.
"I was told for four days that he wasn't going to make it," Kitty Hubbard said by telephone from the couple's home.
She said Bosich made all the arrangements to fly her husband home with oxygen and cared for him throughout the trip, including a four-hour layover in Los Angeles.
"She's called him twice, and she sent him a care package with a Hawaiian Open golf hat We love her. She's terrific."
"She's a dear girl," Gordon Hubbard said. "She's a good nurse. She's strong, too. She said, 'Don't give me any back talk.' She saw to it that I did everything right.
"Wasn't I lucky to get her? She did everything for us, getting tickets, changing everything We could lean on Amy. She could make anybody well, that girl."
Care of accident victim
By Helton Altonn
‘like a good recon mission’
Star-BulletinRobert Lansdell, 26, banquet manager at the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Kauai, was entertaining his family at Queen's Bath on June 29. He and his wife, Keiko, had held a wedding ceremony three days earlier, although they actually had been married for several months.
"There's a rock you can dive off," he said. "I've done it many, many times, but this time I guess the tide was too low and I ended up diving into a rock hitting my head."
Lansdell was airlifted to Wilcox Hospital on Kauai, then flown to Queen's. The accident left him a paraplegic, but while at Queen's he said he was "doing really well. I'm trying to take it day by day and not look too far ahead even if this is all I have."
His parents, who live in Baltimore, arranged with Flying Nurses to take him there to Kernan Hospital for rehabilitation.
"He's doing very well, his spirits are excellent," Robert's father, Mark Lansdell, said recently by telephone. He said Robert can move his arms from the chest up but hasn't recovered any movement in his legs or hands.
He said the trip to Baltimore via Houston "went flawlessly" because of Amy Bosich's organization and planning. "I sing her accolades. She did a wonderful, wonderful job."
After talking to the family initially about the plans, Bosich had to go on a trip to the West Coast, Canada and Alaska, he said.
"But she still called us every day to assure us that she was still on top of it, making plans, getting medication updates of things he was going to need, what she wanted to have for the flight, how she wanted us to prepare for it, what we should expect from (Michael Frye, the nurse who accompanied Robert).
"She was just very, very thorough. It was orchestrated as well as any operation I've ever seen, like a good recon mission."
Among the many details to be worked out, Bosich had to research airlines to find an aircraft with fully reclining sleeper seats, Lansdell said. He said Frye had to reposition Robert about every half hour to avoid pressure sores. "Michael was just such a professional, and Amy, I can't say enough about her."
He said the cost was "very, very reasonable And the kindness with which she approached the whole deal, it's very difficult to describe.
"Money has to change hands, of course, but she was more focused on the patient and the patient's family."
