ERLANGER, Ky. — Anyone who needed quick medical care before being flown in the back of a helicopter toward a hospital would probably want to know the person caring for them had the best training possible to handle anything thrown their way.

Spending time with heroes who save lives regularly, and seeing up close how they prepare, isn’t an opportunity that’s regularly available, but it was on Friday at the St. Elizabeth Training and Education Center in Erlanger.

It wasn’t looking too good for the training dummy, who, in this scenario, had just gone into cardiac arrest. The good thing was, this wasn’t the first time the people caring for him had been in this situation.

“I’d say about three to five times a day, we’ll be flying out to St. Elizabeth,” said AJ Mehltretter, flight nurse for Air Evac.

On the training day, even if Mehltretter and his partner had messed up, they found solace because their patient was made of plastic. Despite that, they performed up to the standard they needed to give the dummy the best chance of living, had he actually been alive to begin with.

“When we do training, we can get really specific situations that we might not always see in the field—stuff that we don’t do every day, so it’s great to practice it here. When you’re doing these training simulations, you can make mistakes. You don’t hurt anybody. When you’re out in the real world, you can’t make mistakes,” Mehltretter said.

He added that the training helps point out everyone’s weaknesses, so that when they’re back out in the field, their skills are honed in.

Mehltretter and Heather Lantman, also a registered nurse, have both been with Air Evac, one of the largest medical providers of helicopter EMS, for about a year and a half.

“It’s everything I’ve ever dreamed of. You learn something new every day. You don’t know everything, so it’s always fun learning something different,” Lantman said.

Mehltretter was equally thrilled to be doing the job he loves every day.

“I love aviation, I love helicopters, I love doing critical care, so this was a dream job for me,” he said.

When people in rural areas need help, Air Evac EMS like these two come in and fly them to hospitals in cities like Cincinnati, Lexington and Louisville.

Training simulations, like the ones they were able to go through with the equipment provided by their partner St. Elizabeth Healthcare on Friday, help them stay sharp as they work through their protocols.

“We always like to do training every month. We practice intubations and run scenarios. Using their equipment here and their facility has been great. It’s a lot more realistic with the equipment they have,” Mehltretter said.

Lantman said the protocols they go through closely mirror real life situations.

“This dummy does exactly what a real-life situation would’ve done if we did something poorly. This dummy would’ve shown us that, and it would’ve had consequences for that,” she said. “It allowed us to really just go through our whole protocol, and figure out what the next step would be if this was a situation that we’d run into out in the field.”

Air Evac handles all of St. Elizabeth’s stroke and heart attack alerts, so EMS always needs to be ready.

“Anytime they have a stroke alert, we are sent to them automatically, and we wait to see if the patient needs to fly to [University of Cincinnati] or not,” Mehltretter said. “We do 24-hour shifts. So we’re always at the base. Somebody’s always staffing it. Usually we’re able to sleep through the night. Sometimes we’re not.”

St. Elizabeth EMS Coordinator Chris Vogelpohl helps with the training.

“The more training our pre-hospital care providers get, the better the outcomes for all the patients, for everybody involved,” Vogelpohl said. “We try to throw different things at them to see how they can adjust on the fly.”

It’s the high-pressure, high–stakes kind of job that most people are simply not cut out for. Lucky for most people, and the dummy used on Friday, people like Lantman and Mehltretter are most certainly cut out for it.

Mehltretter said Air Evac can respond to almost every call it gets from St. Elizabeth. Besides taking all the hospital’s stroke and heart attack calls, its helicopters also respond to other emergency situations like crashes.