This month’s Hometown Hero is Brittney Marchant, a flight nurse and base outreach coordinator for Care Flight. Marchant is a native of Walterboro and attended Colleton County High School. After high school, she attended USC-Beaufort for four years and got her bachelor’s degree in nursing. During college, she worked at Colleton Regional, and upon graduation, she became a nurse at Trident Hospital for about three years. After returning to Colleton as a nurse, she then started working at Care Flight. Care Flight provides helicopter emergency medical services, covering counties within 150 miles of Colleton County; this includes Hampton, Bamberg, Dorchester, and Berkeley Counties. Marchant explains Care Flight, “To put it simply, Care Flight is an interfacility transport ambulance using a helicopter instead of a ground ambulance. We do scene work in the surrounding counties, and interfacility work in South Carolina, Georgia, and occasionally North Carolina. We land on scenes and at hospitals, so whereverwhoever's calling us with a patient, we typically go to them.”
In addition to flying, her position with Care Flight is the Base Outreach Coordinator. She is responsible for community outreach and developing relationships with the EMS and hospital systems to set up ride-alongs for people who are interested in a career with Care Flight. She also handles their social media.
Marchant said Flight Nursing piqued her interest, “Flight Nursing was something that I knew existed in college. I always had some base level of interest in it, but at that time it required five years of experience in ER/ICU. I was more focusing on getting that experience first, and then whenever I was working at Trident, the careflight crew specifically were in and out of the hospital pretty regularly. I had received many patients from them, and during that time a couple of them asked me if it was something that I'd ever thought of doing. I did a couple of ride-alongs, and then whenever the position was available, I applied.”
Nurses and pilots are employed by Medtrans, and Marchant falls into that category. The paramedics are employed by Colleton County Fire-Rescue and are staff on the aircraft.
The Care-Flight helicopter is based locally at HCA Colleton Hospital.
