County Helicopter Program Rushes Doctors to Rescue : Emergencies: A UCLA physician’s arrival by air is credited with saving the life of a child who nearly drowned in a swimming pool in Hidden Hills.

On a blustery morning last November, Kirk Mathews faced a parent’s nightmare when he hung up the telephone and found his 13-month-old son, Dylan, floating face down in the back yard swimming pool.

And were it not for a little-known Los Angeles County Fire Department program, Mathews might have been shaking his head in grief Monday instead of shaking the hand of the UCLA Medical Center physician who saved Dylan’s life.

Dr. Tom Carter was aboard the rescue helicopter that touched down outside Mathews’ Hidden Hills home minutes after Dylan was discovered Nov. 22. Paramedics and others credit Carter’s presence with saving Dylan’s life and sparing him the ravages of brain damage.

“I would have given him my best and my prayers,” said paramedic Layne Contreras, who was aboard the helicopter that day.

Since May, resident physicians from four Southern California hospitals have been accompanying rescue crews aboard county helicopters, offering medical services that paramedics cannot. In Dylan Mathews’ case, Carter inserted a tracheal breathing tube to help get oxygen to the child’s lungs, a procedure paramedics are not authorized to perform on children under 12.

Doctors have been flying aboard county helicopters since the 1970s, but never under a coordinated program, said Jim Sanchez, chief of the Fire Department’s air operations bureau based at Whiteman Airport in Pacoima.

But since May, the smattering of local physicians who work with the helicopter paramedics have been joined by residents from UCLA, USC, Martin Luther King-Drew and Harbor medical centers. Doctors are aboard the helicopters about one-third of the time.

The Mathewses were lucky. Carter was assigned to a helicopter based in Malibu the day Dylan Mathews found his way into an uncovered swimming pool. Minutes after Mathews pulled his son from the water and called 911, the county helicopter landed.

Carter found Mathews crouched over Dylan’s lifeless body on the dining room floor. He was performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but Carter said the child was blue and not breathing. His heartbeat faded.

“Dylan, for all intents and purposes, was dead,” Carter said.

During the eight-minute helicopter trip to UCLA Medical Center, Carter inserted the tracheal tube to help Dylan breathe and worked to improve his vital signs. “We had to do relatively little in the emergency room,” said Dr. David Schriger, who treated Dylan at the hospital. “The outcome would have been very, very different if Tom had not been there. His presence, what he did, made the difference.”