RickInOz

Since I was up all last night on yet another Retrieval, I thought it would be interesting to go through an aspect of our work. This posting will be about the first stage in one of our “missions”.

Mediflight offers a range of services as I covered in a previous posting. We retrieve criticially ill patients usually for clinical reasons, in other words to get them to a treatment or procedure, but also occasionally for logistical reasons. The sources are as follows:

South Australian Ambulance Service:

If paramedics attending an accident scene determine that a patient is “Level 1″, in other words is severely injured, they will ask for our attendance. In this situation we will get a call from SAAS Communications to say the helicopter is on the way and we have to rush to the helideck to meet them. From time to time we are “stood down” if the patients turn out to be less injured than initially thought, but on the whole we go.

Another hospital in Adelaide:

Many of the metro hospitals don’t offer all services so we may be asked to move a patient, usually for an operation or procedure. This will typically be from one of the smaller public or private hospitals to another larger centre. Occasionally we move patients for logistical reasons. The most common instance will be if the ICU is full where the patient is. We will then retrieve them to another ICU bed in the city. Obviously this is highly undesirable, but inevitable with a limited resource.

A rural hospital:

There are many small hospitals in South Australia. Some offer reasonably comprehensive services including day surgery and 24hr emergency services, but many more are cottage hospitals with limited resuscitation resources. They are usually staffed by GPs, who are highly experienced, but often lack regular exposure to critically ill patients, so naturally feel a little overwhelmed. They tend to do a good job of initial management but are not equipped to keep such patients.

Northern Territory:

In political administration terms the Northern Territory comes under the auspices of South Australia. This means if there is a sick patient in Alice Springs or Darwin, we will undertake the retrieval. Such jobs work in a similar manner to the local intra-state retrievals, but obviously the distances are somewhat further. For such jobs we tend to charter a Lear jet rather than use the RFDS plane – more about that in a future posting.

Inter-state or international:

Normally we move public patients for the South Australian Department of Health, but like all government agencies we need to raise additional revenue. Mediflight also operates as a private company, and as such we tender for insurance jobs and repatriation missions. These may involve bringing a patient from abroad back to Australia or from one part of Australia to their home town. We tend to go with a commercial airline as the insurance company will pay for a row of seats which will be removed to accommodate the stretcher. It sounds rather glamorous, but is actually quite tedious and tiring.

Wherever the patient’s location and no matter what their destination, we can always find a way of moving them safely. There are few jobs we would refuse, even sometimes going many hundreds of kilometres from civilisation if necessary. More about how we organise and execute these jobs will be covered in future postings.