Disaster Travel > Articles > Emergency Airlift [when the local hospital has a dirt floor]

Sometimes things go wrong. Travelling in a strange land creates its own difficulties. you are given bad advice; you are ripped off; you are fed strange and unusual foods. [On an internal flight in China I was once served “beef” for lunch. It wasn’t beef. My guess is that it was distressed yak a la Mode. I spent the next two days in the bathroom.]

Lots of people avoid the water supply in foreign countries. The Queen of England always takes her own bottled water with her when she travels. In third world countries one has no option, and should stay away from vegetables that have been washed in the local water supply as well.

There are some ailments, however, that can’t be solved with a day in bed, or salt tablets. Sometimes things go seriously wrong and one finds oneself in a foreign land with a friend or relation who is seriously ill. The local hospital has a dirt floor and a newly installed generator. What do you do?

You call for an air ambulance. Even if you're travelling without medical insurance, you don’t need to be a millionaire to get a plane, a pilot, a nurse and the right medical equipment. There are a number of specialist companies that provide this service, mostly in the U.S. and Europe, but also in South and Central America. Some of them will try to arrange everything including transport from a foreign hospital to the nearest airport or airstrip. If they don’t, local doctors tend to be sympathetic to foreigners and want to get them out of their hair anyway.

In Europe, I’ve had to use Air Medical, based in Oxford in the UK. I like the fact that they give me the pilot’s mobile number so that I could stay in touch if there were any problems. They only need an hour’s notice; availability of pilots permitting. They fly to your destination and arrange for the ambulance to be on the runway and take you directly to hospital. The patient never leaves the stretcher from hospital to hospital.

In this type of situation, you might feel that getting a very sick person from one country to another is going to be fraught with problems. However, a good air ambulance company knows this and tries to make the procedure as simple as possible. You might never have done this before, but they have. Just make sure that you make your decision to call an air ambulance as quickly as possible.

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