Category: Health

Med Flight staff at UW Hospital will begin “confidence” flights later this week as they slowly recover from the shock of losing three of their team in a helicopter crash May 10.

UW Health spokesman Aaron Conklin said by e-mail that the Med Flight staff is undergoing “a healing and rebuilding process” and won’t resume patient flights for a while.

Nearly 400 emergency services personnel from across southern Wisconsin honored three of their fallen comrades Thursday night at a commemorative ceremony on the roof of Monona Terrace in Madison.

The public memorial service, which was organized to commemorate the lives of Dr. Darren Bean and Med Flight pilot Steve Lipperer by their families, was attended by more than 1,450 friends, family, colleagues and members of the public. It featured outpourings of sympathy and sadness, and showed how close to home the tragedy has hit for some.

Saturday’s crash of a Med Flight helicopter near La Crosse should heighten Wisconsin’s sense of urgency about providing medical helicopters with recommended safety equipment.
When the helicopter leased to UW Hospital crashed into a hillside, killing all three on board, it was not equipped with night vision goggles or terrain warning technology.

The National Transportation Safety Board has recommended both devices for medical helicopters since 2006.

Mourners by the hundreds remembered Dr. Darren Bean and Steve Lipperer for their kindness, skill and humor Thursday, and then the bells tolled for them. Bean and Lipperer, along with nurse Mark Coyne of Waunakee, died Saturday when their Med Flight helicopter crashed near La Crosse.

A tear-stained gathering of 1,500 people watched the memorial procession Thursday evening from the Monona Terrace Convention Center rooftop. Madison police vehicles, several fire vehicles and a fire truck held off traffic on Wilson Street and Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard to make way for the two white hearses.

At least 100 uniformed men and women from Med Flight, the Madison Fire Department, Madison Police, the Dane County Sheriff’s Office and emergency medical services lined up along the bridge to the rooftop, where they stood for more than an hour as friends, family, colleagues and many others whom Bean and Lipperer touched arrived to honor their dedication and their lives.

Downtown motorists should expect traffic delays Thursday afternoon at rush hour due to the memorial service scheduled at Monona Terrace for Dr. Darren Bean and pilot Steve Lipperer, two of the three UW Hospital Med Flight crew members killed Saturday night in a helicopter crash near La Crosse.

No parking will be allowed on East Wilson Street between King Street and South Hamilton Street from 1 p.m. to about 8:30 p.m. Several emergency vehicles and funeral vehicles are also expected in the Monona Terrace area between 5 and 9 p.m.

The memorial services for Bean and Lipperer will begin at 7 p.m. at Monona Terrace.

Saturday’s crash of a Med Flight helicopter near La Crosse should heighten Wisconsin’s sense of urgency about providing medical helicopters with recommended safety equipment.
When the helicopter leased to UW Hospital crashed into a hillside, killing all three on board, it was not equipped with night vision goggles or terrain warning technology.

Confusion over memorial funds for the three victims in Saturday night’s Med Flight helicopter crash has prompted UW Health to take down a Web site initially set up for donations.

UW Health said would-be contributors were upset that money could be going to the UW Foundation and not according to the wishes of the victims’ families.

“We’ve pulled the information that could in any way be misunderstood,” said UW Health spokesperson Lisa Brunette. “It was never our intention to cause confusion, so we’ve taken down the Web site.”

Family and medical leave would be extended to part-time workers employed at least 12 months by their employer, under legislation introduced by Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.)

“The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides a good and necessary benefit to some of our working families,” Baldwin said in statement. “It’s imperative we make those benefits available to all our working families.”

The original act, in place since 1993, provides up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to full-time employees to care for newborns, adopted children or a seriously ill family member, and leave to temporarily disabled workers, including pregnant women.

The patient transported by a Med Flight helicopter that later crashed died hours after arriving at a La Crosse hospital, a coroner said Tuesday.

The elderly woman died early Sunday after suffering bleeding in her brain, Crawford County Coroner Joe Morovitz said.

The University of Wisconsin Hospital Med Flight helicopter crashed Saturday night on the way home to Madison after dropping the woman off at Gundersen Lutheran hospital. A doctor, nurse and pilot on board were killed.

A faulty altitude detector was cited as a contributing factor in the last fatal crash of the same kind of helicopter owned by the same company as the Med Flight chopper that crashed Saturday night near La Crosse.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the UW Hospital Med Flight crash that killed three, said a faulty radar altimeter contributed to the crash of a Eurocopter EC135 helicopter in the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., in January 2005.

The UW Med Flight helicopter that crashed near La Crosse did not have two pieces of safety technology recommended by the National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration, but an official of the company that owned the craft said Monday it was installing them as quickly as it could on its 330-craft fleet.

Mike Allen, senior vice president at Denver-based Air Methods, said the helicopter was not equipped with a computerized voice system to warn of approaching terrain or night vision goggles for the pilot. Air Methods provided the craft, pilot and aircraft maintenance services under contract with University of Wisconsin Hospital.

Fire departments and emergency medical personnel will gather this morning in La Crosse to escort home the hearses of three people killed in a Saturday medical helicopter crash.

“Everyone around here feels like they have lost,” said event organizer and La Crosse County Deputy Medical Examiner Tim Candahl.
The escort is a tribute to the crew of three who died when a UW Med Flight helicopter crashed into a wooded hillside near La Crosse on Saturday night.

The Med Flight helicopter that crashed into a wooded hillside near La Crosse on Saturday night, killing its crew of three, did not have night-vision goggles and terrain warning technology as recommended.

But the head of the company that leased the chopper to UW Hospital said Monday the aircraft was safe.

MADISON, Wis. â?? A medical helicopter that crashed in Wisconsin did not have two pieces of safety technology the National Transportation Safety Board has recommended to prevent crashes, company officials said Monday.

Mike Allen, senior vice president at Denver-based Air Methods, said the helicopter was not equipped with a computerized voice system to warn of approaching terrain or night vision goggles for the pilot.

His company leased the helicopter to the University of Wisconsin Hospital for its Med Flight program that crashed Saturday night after dropping off a patient at a La Crosse hospital. There were no survivors in the crash that killed a surgeon, nurse and pilot.

The company that operated the medical helicopter that crashed near La Crosse is updating its fleet with the latest safety equipment but had not retrofitted that aircraft, officials said Monday.

The Med Flight helicopter from the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics crashed into a bluff minutes after takeoff Saturday night from La Crosse, killing all three crew members aboard.

MADISON, Wis. — A federal investigator was in La Crosse on Monday as authorities search for what caused a University of Wisconsin Hospital Med Flight helicopter to crash on Saturday night, killing all three crew members on board.

This past weekend’s crash of a Med Flight helicopter caused a tragic coincidence on Monday at the Badger Chapter of the Red Cross.

Dr. Darren Bean spent much time in recent months teaching health professionals about a new form of CPR. On Monday, volunteers from the Red Cross, who were taught by Dr. Bean, began teaching the public the life-saving technique called compression-only CPR.

As investigators comb through the shattered pieces of the UW MedFlight helicopter, they are asking one big question: could two pieces of well-known safety equipment have prevented this? The answer is maybe.

A company spokesman says the medical helicopter that crashed in Wisconsin did not have two pieces of safety equipment recommended by the National Transportation Safety Board.

UW Hospital staff struggles to deal with the loss of their colleagues.

Mark Hanson, Program Manager for the UW Hospital Med Flight program, says it was their decision to ground their second medical helicopter until they feel they are emotionally ready to take flight again. That chopper was voluntarily grounded after Saturday night’s fatal crash in LaCrosse. Hanson says the staff is undergoing stress debriefing sessions and they’ll return to flight when they’re good and ready.

Mark Coyne gave liberally of himself, as an emergency nurse teaching thousands of students and in his strongly held opinions.

“One time he said to me, just in passing, A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle, ‘ ” said Todd Cole, a student, friend and colleague of Coyne ‘s for 20 years. “I look out and I think of all the candles he ‘s lit in the state of Wisconsin and it ‘s just amazing. “

The pilot of the crashed Med Flight helicopter, Steve Lipperer, was a calm, experienced hand at his work, a friend said Sunday.

Heather Grant, a friend of Lipperer and his wife, Dr. Desiree La Charite, said Lipperer worked as a pilot for at least two decades.

Dr. Darren Bean was always moving.

“He was one of those people who have a million different things they want to do, and they ‘re doing them all at once, ” said Dr. Paul Stiegler, medical director of Dane County ‘s Emergency Medical Services.

“He was a bright star, and he brought everybody into what he was doing, ” Stiegler said.

To say Dr. Darren Bean was a high achiever would be an understatement.

Besides his role as a Med Flight physician for six years and the Madison Fire Department’s medical director for the past 16 months, he was the director of ultrasound for the UW Hospital emergency department, according to UW Hospital’s Web site. He was a member of the hospital’s mulidisciplinary trauma committee and the Regional Trauma Advisory Committee.

An assistant professor with the UW School of Medicine who received his medical degree from the University of Vermont College of Medicine, he had subspecialties in clinical research in pediatric and adult sedations, complex airway management, multi-trauma and bedside ultrasound.

Dr. Darren Bean spent time teaching cardiocerebral resuscitation to Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and members of the Madison City Council and Madison Rotary Club over the past six weeks.

Bean, along with nurse Mark Coyne and pilot Steve Lipperer, died in a Med Flight helicopter crash near La Crosse Saturday night, and Cieslewicz said he became acquainted with Bean and his work over the past year.

“All three of the men dying is, of course, a terrible tragedy,” Cieslewicz said. “I only knew Dr. Bean so I can only speak directly of him.”

Bean, a member of the UW Hospital staff since 2002, began a position as the Madison Fire Department’s medical director in 2007. He was a huge advocate of the CCR method, a new protocol being used by Madison firefighters and other responders.

Steve Lipperer, the pilot of the Med Flight helicopter that crashed Saturday night near La Crosse, was recently married to Dr. Desiree La Charite, a Med Flight physician since 2001. The couple lives in the town of Westport.

Lipperer had been with Med Flight for more than 20 years, said Glenn Kimmel, associate professor of medicine in the UW’s section of emergency medicine.

“He was also a private pilot and a great guy,” Kimmel said.

Mark Coyne loved sailing, flying and Jimmy Buffett. But most of all, he loved teaching emergency medical services.

“Just a couple weeks ago, we were both talking shop about EMS,” said his friend, Todd Cole. “He said, ‘You know, I really make a difference with what I do. Teaching really means something. I’ve really affected a lot of people.’

“I said, ‘You absolutely have, Mark.’ It was one of those comments that was so true.”

Coyne, 54, was the nurse on board the Med Flight helicopter that crashed on Saturday night. He was also a full-time EMS instructor at Madison Area Technical College, where he had worked since 1987.

MADISON, Wis. â?? A medical helicopter dropped off a patient and then crashed shortly after it took off on its return flight to Madison, killing the surgeon, nurse and pilot on board, officials said Sunday.

MADISON, Wis. — Officials are beginning the process of piecing together what happened before a University of Wisconsin Hospital Med Flight helicopter crashed on Saturday night, killing all three crew members on board.

The helicopter had traveled from Madison to La Crosse to drop off a patient at Gunderson Lutheran Hospital in La Crosse and was heading back to Madison when officials said they lost contact with the craft. Authorities launched a search on Saturday night and the crash site was found on Sunday morning.

More than 75 doctors, nurses, pilots and patients have died in medical helicopter crashes across the country in the past decade as the workers risk their lives to transport patients in need of medical care.

The reality of that risk has hit Madison, where three members of a UW Hospital Med Flight crew died late Saturday in a crash near La Crosse. It was the first crash since Med Flight began in 1985.

For the doctors and nurses on air medical teams, the helicopters used to transport critically injured and ill patients often become simply the room where they work.

That unique, pressure-packed environment drew Darren Bean, Mark Coyne and Steve Lipperer to work for University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics’ Med Flight. All three men chose a profession that creates a bond among people who often must make life-or-death decisions quickly.

A Med Flight helicopter from the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics in Madison had taken off from La Crosse and turned toward home late Saturday when authorities lost contact with the aircraft less than six minutes into the flight.

Because of rain and fog and the densely wooded, hilly terrain, it took authorities until Sunday morning to find the twisted wreckage of the helicopter and the bodies of the pilot, flight doctor and nurse.

Town of Medary, La Crosse County: Randy Viner and his wife Deborah were in bed just before 11 Saturday night when Deborah heard a loud crash coming from the woods behind their home. “It sounded like thunder, but I’m thinking why is it thundering because it’s not raining that hard out?”

The next morning firefighters found the missing Med Flight helicopter a quarter-mile from their home.

The helicopter took off from the airport about five miles to the west of the Keil Coulee valley. It crashed into the trees as it came over the ridge, slid down the slope, and came to a rest against some trees -about halfway down the valley.

MADISON, Wis. — A University of Wisconsin Med Flight helicopter crashed on a journey from La Crosse on Saturday night. Three crew people were killed.

The helicopter disappeared on Saturday night and authorities launched a search. The crash site was found on Sunday morning.

A UW spokesman said that three people onboard the helicopter died in the crash. They were identified as Dr. Darren Bean, a physician, Mark Coyne, a registered nurse, and Steve Lipperer, the pilot. The three victims all lived in Madison, WISC-TV reported.

Many family and friends of the Med Flight crew members who were killed Saturday night near LaCrosse heard the tragic news for the first time. Many of those mourning are in disbelief.

All three members of the deadly crash were from the Madison area. Friends of the victims we spoke with on Sunday said they were more than just Med Flight workers. They were fathers, friends and mentors to the entire emergency medical community.

Madison Assistant Fire Chief Jim Keiken is in disbelief. “I was just sick,” he said. Keiken was among those who found out that co-worker, and friend, Dr. Darren Bean was killed in Saturday night’s crash. “I hoping the information was incorrect,” said Keiken. “And that you later find out he was safe.”

Saturday night’s crash of a medical helicopter was the first in the history of UW Hospital’s Med Flight program. For more than two decades, Med Flight helicopters have transported patients daily, with no issues.

Before the crash near LaCrosse that killed all three crew members on board, the helicopters took off and landed three to four times a day. They fly an average of 55 miles to transport patients.
“The aircraft we fly is the most popular make and model of helicopters used in EMS patient transport,” said Med Flight program director Mark Hanson.

May 8, 2008 — An expert panel’s new quit-smoking guideline says more smokers would quit if their doctors offered them both counseling and medication — and if health plans covered the expense.

The official 256-page U.S. Public Health Service guideline comes from a panel of 37 experts who reviewed some 8,700 scientific articles — about 2,700 of them published since the last guideline came out in 2000.

What’s different? More hope, says panel chairman Michael C. Fiore, MD, MPH, founder and director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention.

Eight months after a UW Hospital employee became ill with tuberculosis, she has recovered and returned to work, and none of her co-workers acquired the potentially fatal lung disease.

University of Wisconsin announced Monday the four finalists for a position as executive director of University Health Services for the fall semester.

MADISON, Wis. — Infant child abuse cases might trigger the stereotyping of abusers, but a prominent child abuse specialist in Madison said the crime cuts across all demographics and often involves well-intentioned parents.

Child abuse experts said that nationally an average of three children die each day from child abuse or neglect and that at least four out of five child abuse victims in general are abused by at least one parent, often by a parent who lacks simple support during stressful times.

“I certainly see on a day-to-day basis, well-meaning parents who became so frustrated, and made really bad choices in regards to their children. And these are people who clearly love children but just made really horrific choices,” said Barabara Knox, medical director of the University of Wisconsin Health’s Child Protection Program at American Family Children’s Hospital in Madison.

A U-W Health Services psychiatrist says a habit once promoted as helping psychological well-being is now endangering people coping with mental health or addiction problems. An initiative being developed by the U-W Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention in Madison, seeks to address the problem. Brian Bull reportsâ?¦ (Audio.)

Individuals and organizations advancing the cause of public health in Madison and Dane County are being honored today (April 16) by city and county leaders in ceremonies at Warner Park Community Recreation Center.

….Partnership awards were given to Sharon Younkin, community service program director of the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, for her work in matching medical students with six community service programs, including programs for at-risk pregnant women, health promotion for residents in the Allied Drive neighborhood and a mentoring program for middle school students, and to Samuel Dennis, assistant professor in the UW-Madison Department of Landscape Architecture, for his work on the built environment and its connection to health and well-being, including projects that help youth in at-risk neighborhoods.