Guardian Flight will be taking up residency at the Kenai Municipal Airport in April. Kenai City Manger Paul Ostrander made the announcement at the Kenai City Council meeting on February 21.
Jessica Hyatt of Guardian Flight discusses the types of emergencies that they can respond to: “We can respond to most scene-calls, but normally what we do is facility calls. You guys are very fortunate to have such great hospitals here on the Kenai Peninsula, and so a lot of times what we see is the hospital just can’t take on a heavy trauma that needs to either go to Alaska Regional Hospital up north or down south to Seattle. We do burns, strokes, all sorts of things, pediatric flights. When you guys need us the most, we want to be there.”
She also offers details on subscribing to a membership with Guardian, to ease any possible out of pocket costs for the varying needs of Alaska’s residents and visitors who utilize the service: “It actually costs $125 a year, and that’s per household. That’s actually not per-person. Annually, it’s $125 a year and it saves you anywhere between $80-100,000. Our coverage also aids – it doesn’t limit you to the number of flights you take. So, if you have a situation and you need to be flown once, twice, three times, you’re not limited to that. A lot of times, what we see is that we need to fly patients out of these areas so we get them to Anchorage, but then Anchorage needs to send them down to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Denver for specialty care, so what we do is we put them on our transport aircraft and we take them to where their next higher level of care is. It’s all covered in your membership.”
Guardian Flight will be headquartered locally in the Kenai Municipal Airport, residing over one of the hangers on the airport strip. They are the state’s largest air medical provider with more aircraft in more places than all of the other organizations in the state combined. For more information about this new addition to the community, call Guardian at (907) 245-6230.