By Greg Halbleib

BLOOMINGTON – A medical helicopter is staying in Bloomington on a full-time basis to improve the availability of emergency air service.

OSF Life Flight had been alternating its fourth aircraft between Pontiac and Bloomington from week to week. Life Flight outreach coordinator Karen Arndt said with the addition of two Eastern Illinois hospitals under the OSF umbrella, keeping the aircraft in Bloomington will better serve the entire system.

“OSF Aviation thought it would be best that instead of flipping back and forth between Pontiac in Bloomington that we would just keep it in Bloomington,” Arndt said. “That puts us a little bit closer to the hospitals that we brought into the system in Danville and Urbana.

Arndt said the helicopters are used for a variety of medical purposes.

“Patients that are having what we’ll call time-critical emergencies such as a stroke or a heart attack where they need to get to a cath lab or have an intervention done quickly, or bad trauma patients,” Arndt explained. “Another common use for our aircraft is when we have pediatric patients because a lot of our ground providers are not that comfortable (with them).”

Other aircraft are based in Rockford, Peru and Peoria.

Greg Halbleib can be reached at [email protected].