Kentucky Air Guard medics share expertise with Ecuadorian counterparts

Two airmen from the Kentucky Air National Guard traveled to Ecuador in April to brief their counterparts on Critical Care Air Transport Team operations, part of a long-running security cooperation link between the two forces.

The information exchange, held April 12-17 under the National Guard Bureau’s State Partnership Program, followed Kentucky’s support in 2024 to help Ecuador stand up C-130 Hercules operations — assistance that spurred new interest in the aeromedical mission, according to Lt. Col. Tim Ori, the officer in charge, and Maj. April Paulsen, the group’s senior health administrator.

CCATTs deliver intensive, in-flight care to wounded service members during aeromedical evacuations. Teams are typically built around a physician, a critical-care nurse and a respiratory therapist, configured to stabilize and monitor patients in the unique conditions of flight.

“When they found out that we have CCATTs here in Louisville as part of our Air National Guard unit, they asked if we could come down and participate in an exchange of ideas,” Ori said. “We discussed our capabilities, the mission scope, what exactly we do, and how we manage transporting critically injured and critically ill patients.”

Paulsen underscored the stakes of the work, noting that altitude and cabin pressure can affect medications and respiratory conditions in flight. “It’s their job to take our most critically injured personnel and get them stabilized and transported to wherever they need to go,” she said. “Medicine is different up in the air. With different elevations, medicines are pushed a different way through IVs. If you have some type of lung condition or injury, going up into a different elevation can impact that injury.”

The exchange was “an unquestionable success,” Ori said. “We were able to show them what our unit arrives with and how we set it up. It definitely left an impression with them for how they can be prepared as military medical units. They had a lot of questions about where the equipment comes from, how we were able to purchase it, who maintains it. It was a new outlook on the entire process for them.”

Kentucky and Ecuador have been paired since 1996 through the State Partnership Program, which links National Guard units with allied militaries for training and cooperation.