Medical repatriation via air ambulance services for safe treatment

When injury or illness strikes and you are unable to be treated by the hospital workers in your part of the country, medical repatriation can help to transport you to a hospital in a part of the country that has the experts or machinery that you desperately need.

If you are unfortunate enough to have an injury or medical issue in a place which is not ideal or specialised in the injury or illness that you’ve suffered, then medical repatriation will be needed. This can come in the form of ground or air travel in which the patient is transported from their original place to a medical building in which they can be suitably treated.

Specialist treatment

For example, you may have suffered a head injury that can only be treated with a certain type of machine scanning all the while, or by a specialist that is unavailable in your part of the country. In this situation you would need to be transported via an air ambulance service to another more suitable part of the country in order to receive the treatment you need.

In the aforementioned situation, you would most likely be transported to your destination via a helicopter or similar air vehicle. The concept being that helicopters are more able to fly at lower heights therefore avoiding plane route restrictions, as well as being able to land and take off almost anywhere. This allows helicopters to land in fields or on hills where a plane would be essentially useless.

An example

Take the example of a person hiking on a hillside. The person hiking might be walking along enjoying a fine day of rambling, when the weather turns and the ground underfoot becomes slippery due to rain, meaning that they slip on a cliff edge and fall to the ledge below. This fall results in them breaking their spine in a few places.

The hiker is left on the hillside for a few minutes before another walker finds them and calls for help to the ambulance service. Due to the nature of their injury and the geographical location of the injury, an air ambulance is needed and so the air ambulance service is called and a helicopter is deployed on a mission.

Once the helicopter arrives, the casualty is lifted carefully onboard and they are then flown securely but briskly to a hospital for evaluation and treatment. The treatment stabilises the patient, but their injuries are of a type that is not commonly treated in the part of the country they are in, and so medical repatriation is required.

The patient is securely moved, once stable, to a helicopter in order to be transported to another part of the country. They travel safely to the new area, and the patient is transported to the hospital and experts that can help them with their injury. All going well, their injuries are treated and they are allowed to rest and recuperate in the new hospital in this different part of the country.