Hundreds of miles from shore, a member of the U.S. Coast Guard scales down a rope onto a vessel where a passenger is experiencing a medical emergency. In a helicopter above them, two Life Flight Network crew members prepare to treat the patient as soon as they come aboard.

Instead of waiting up to several hours for the aircrew to land at Oregon Health & Science University Hospital in Portland, a collaboration between the Coast Guard and Life Flight allows the patient to receive immediate, potentially lifesaving medical attention during the trip to the hospital.

“Especially in those moments when someone is having a stroke or heart attack, those first two hours are imperative,” said Life Flight medic Chris Pfingsten. “And it will make a big impact on how they recover, if they recover.

“So being able to start ICU-level medications and ICU-level therapies that far out is absolutely lifesaving and life-changing to a lot of these people. So we’re really just stoked to be able to do it, and it’s been a really cool partnership with the Coast Guard. It’s kind of that perfect team. They go where we can’t. We provide care that they don’t.”

The partnership is made possible by the use of a Jayhawk helicopter, which has the space to fit two Coast Guard members, two Life Flight members and up to six additional people on board.

The helicopter can fly a crew up to 300 miles offshore, remain on-scene for 45 minutes and return to base in Warrenton while maintaining an adequate fuel reserve. Air Station Astoria is one of two Coast Guard bases in the western continental United States to have a Jayhawk.

Most recently, the Coast Guard and Life Flight put their partnership to work with the joint rescues of an injured passenger on a cruise ship 175 miles offshore in April and of a crew member aboard an oil tanker 200 miles offshore with stroke-like symptoms in May.

Two Life Flight members who assisted in the April rescue received an award from the Coast Guard. Shawn Penninger, a flight paramedic, and Trevor Cowling, a flight nurse, were honored with the Sikorsky Rescue Award.

“This is the first time we’ve done an awards ceremony over there, which was cool,” Pfingsten said. “Trevor and Shawn, their patient was very, very sick, and they did a lot of good work on the way. That was well earned, for sure.”

Collaboration between the Coast Guard and Life Flight was first suggested in 2015, when veteran pilot Dan Leary retired from the Coast Guard and joined Life Flight. He saw that Life Flight medics could be a valuable resource for rescues involving medical emergencies.

“He gave me some contacts and I started talking to people over there,” Pfingsten said. “And so I started organizing an annual familiarization where our crews would go over there and practice loading their helicopters and see what equipment they had to avoid redundancies.”

By 2022, the two organizations were training together and embarking on joint rescue missions.

The close proximity of the Coast Guard air base and the Life Flight base at Astoria Regional Airport has been instrumental in the partnership.

“It seems like there’s a real mutual respect between the two organizations,” said Life Flight spokesperson Natalie Hannah. “We’re very much in awe of and grateful for the service that they provide, and they seem to be reciprocating that sentiment as well … high-fives all around.”

Pfingsten said the Coast Guard and Life Flight have been embarking on an increasing number of joint ventures.

“It used to be, when I first came to this base, it was kind of a once-in-a-career kind of thing,” he said. “You didn’t really hear about it. But after we started doing the familiarization, and they got used to our capabilities and how quickly we can be ready, they’ve been a little more quick to activate.

“And of course, now we have more knowledge to use, and we’re always excited to go.”