A new air ambulance company is providing an essential service for Irish people who take ill while abroad, writes EITHNE DONNELLAN
CRASHING INTO a tree while skiing in the Alps or suffering a stroke during a sunny break in Spain are not the kinds of experiences any of us would wish for while holidaying abroad, but they do happen.
About 250 Irish people have to be repatriated by air ambulance every year after falling ill or having accidents while on trips overseas. It’s a costly business, though it is usually covered by travel insurance. Up to now, however, patients have been brought home on stretchers by a number of foreign carriers as no Irish company offered the service.
That is set to change, as a new Irish air ambulance service is hoping to reclaim much of this business. Since it commenced operations last January, AeroMedevac Ireland has been approved for use by a number the major European assistance companies. It has already been on a mission to Austria to bring back to Northern Ireland a child injured in a skiing accident and one to Las Palmas to bring home a woman who became ill while holidaying in Gran Canaria.
More than €1 million has already been invested in the business, which is supported by Enterprise Ireland. It has bought a Cessna 550 Citation II aircraft, fitted with air ambulance essentials including a stretcher, ventilator, heart monitor and infusion pumps. A panel of doctors and nurses have been trained to be on standby for different types of emergencies.
AeroMedevac Ireland has five full-time employees, including the flight nurse manager Kathy Brickell and a former Ryanair pilot, but it expects to double the number of employees in time.
When the company receives a call looking to take a patient back to Ireland, Brickell liaises with the medical director as to the appropriate medical team to accompany the patient. She also organises the medical equipment, briefs the team that will fly and ensureS ambulances are organised on the ground.
But just how viable is a new company such as this likely to be in the middle of a recession, particularly when efforts by a charitable foundation to get an all-Ireland air ambulance service off the ground have failed to date?
Keith Trower, chief executive of the start-up, says a feasibility study conducted before the business got going suggests the business is a sustainable one. It was seen as a “high potential start-up” by Enterprise Ireland.
“We did a feasibility study which was supported by Enterprise Ireland into the opportunity to create a service in Ireland because Ireland didn’t have a commercial air ambulance,” says Trower.
“I was aware that there were air ambulance operators in France, Germany and the UK providing services to the Irish market, so the opportunity for us was to substitute our service for the services that were being purchased abroad by Irish companies such as the VHI, Aviva Health and Quinn.”
The feasibility study showed that there was sufficient demand for such a service here.
“We decided then to go ahead and invest in acquiring an air ambulance capability and training a panel of 15 doctors and nurses mainly based in Dublin and Cork,” he says.
“We recruited a medical director who has a lot of experience in this area. I had five years’ experience with AXA PPP healthcare in the UK, looking after its overseas emergency medical repatriation service and we had doctors in Dublin who were interested in setting this up.”
Among the investors in the business are Dr David Walsh and Dr Tony Walsh of the Sims Fertility Clinic in Dublin.
The feasibility study found there are about 250 Irish patients who have to be repatriated annually on commercial air ambulances. Trower says that if he can take over even 100 such cases he will be happy. He also hopes to establish a foothold in the UK market, handling the repatriation of British citizens too.
The company is not in competition with the Irish Air Corps, he says, which also provides air ambulance services, transferring patients between hospitals, usually to or from Britain, such as when the Cork-born Benhaffaf twins travelled to London for their separation surgery. If the Air Corps is not available for such a mission in the future, he hopes the Health Service Executive (HSE) “would want to use us as the indigenous commercial air ambulance operator in Ireland”.
AeroMedevac Ireland is going through a HSE accreditation process at present. The company has been approved as a provider by Mapfre Asistencia, Sos International, Europ Assist and Eurocross International. So if a VHI-insured patient is injured abroad, it will be asked to quote to do the repatriation.
“We are also just about approved we believe for Aviva Health, but we haven’t had that confirmed just yet,” Trower says. No deal has yet been reached with Quinn insurance, but AeroMedevac Ireland is already thinking of spreading its wings in other ways.
“We are looking to do a collaboration with an air ambulance company in Europe so we have a wider footprint there and that hopefully will generate more business,” Trower says.
The costs associated with repatriation of somebody who is ill can be substantial. “If you are talking about repatriation from somewhere like central Europe, Austria or whatever, the costs can run to €10,000 or €12,000. If you are talking about further afield like the Canaries it can be well over €20,000. From the Far East it’s more like €80,000,” he says.
The leg of the journey from the Far East to Paris on a Boeing 747 alone would probably cost up to €60,000 before the costs of a wing-to-wing transfer onto an air ambulance to Dublin were considered.
Dr Ross Ardill, who is on the medical panel for repatriations, is a GP based in Dublin’s IFSC. “I think it’s a very important service with people travelling all around the world and the variability of healthcare around the world,” he says.
The service is due to be officially launched this afternoon by Minister for Health James Reilly at Weston Aerodrome in Leixlip, where the air ambulance is based.
