Abigail Brown

// High-flying Nurse // NUR ’10 // 29 //

Abigail Brown was a surgical intensive-care nurse at a Cincinnati hospital when she signed up for the annual summer training camp offered by the university’s Dorothy Ebersbach Academic Center for Flight Nursing.

The experience rekindled her desire to connect with patients, the way she had while working for an Ohio Emergency Medical Service unit as an undergraduate at Miami University. Seeing a new career path, she enrolled in the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing’s flight nursing graduate degree program, a joint venture with the Cleveland Clinic.

Today, Brown is an acute-care nurse practitioner with a flight nursing specialty and a member of the Critical Care Transport Team at the Clinic. She works aboard medical helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft and ground ambulances, attending to the critically ill and injured, which she says is so rewarding.

“We provide patients with a superior level of care and often another day which they might otherwise not have had,” she says.

Last year, her team handled roughly 4,500 transports from around the world. —RM