Meet Our Paramedics

Our choppers are crewed by qualified St John paramedic crew who are experienced pre-hospital emergency clinicians and provide medical care and treatment. They also serve as the winch operators on search and rescue operations.

 St John provide all clinical governance and St John Clinical Crew at all times remain the employees of St John and come under St John chain of command and personnel management.

St John provides an anonymised summary of any SAC 1 and 2 adverse events on their website. If you have any clinical queries, please contact St John directly www.stjohn.org.nz

Paul Davis

Emma Haggerty

Jared Sharples

Josh Raravula

Dan Short

Back-end Developer

Hugo Brighouse

Training of the crew

Ongoing training and education is part of the job. The team regularly partake in clinical review meetings, often with guest physicians, as well as attending medical conferences both nationally and internationally to observe the latest research and developments in pre-hospital emergency care. Notable components of the clinical care provided by the team include:

  • Thrombolysis drug treatment for heart attack patients.
  • The use of portable ultrasound as a diagnostic aid during the assessment of critically ill patients.
  • Rapid Sequence Induction (RSI) for intubation.

 

In addition, team members are required to conduct monthly pool and open water swim training, simulator and live winch training, as well as land and water-based fitness testing every six months. They are also required to undergo Helicopter Underwater Escape Training (HUET) re-certification every two years.

Primary missions

  • Providing Advanced Life Support (ALS) assistance to ambulance crews with time critical patients in remote locations.
  • Deploying in a first-response capacity to remote emergency calls where ambulance access may be limited or delayed.
  • Land and sea search and rescue (SAR) including winch rescue operations.

Inter-hospital transfers

  • Category 1: The Flight Intensive Care Paramedic assists Intensive Care Unit (ICU) doctors and nurses with the inter-hospital transfer of ICU patients.
    • Category 2: The Flight Intensive Care Paramedic is the primary clinician providing on-going treatment and care to all other critically ill patients requiring inter-hospital transfer.