Sky's no limit for Clearwater Air Ambulance firm. (Focus: Health Care) (company profile)

Sky's No Limit For Clearwater Air Ambulance Firm

Barbara Banks fretted and stewed in Detroit.

Her 77-year-old mother, Mercedes Schmidt, was ill in a Brooksville hospital, and the prognosis didn't look good. Schmidt's bowel had closed. Gangrene had set in. She was so malnutritioned that her body had lost its regenerative powers.

"I just couldn't leave her there like that," her daughter says. So Banks spent the night praying for an answer, she says, and in the morning a hospital social worker recommended Care Flight.

Air Ambulance Care Flight International Inc. is a St. Petersburg/Clearwater Airport-based transport service that transports critically ill persons from one hospital to another.

"It's critical care in the air. We give critical care medicine to high-risk patients," says medical director and owner Dr. Kenneth Kreye.

Not to be confused with another Bay Area air ambulance company, St. Joseph's Hospital's Care Flight, this Care Flight would fly a Lear jet to Korea, not a helicopter shuttle to the local emergency room for highway accident victims.

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