Air ambulances not picking up fast enough in the country

NEW DELHI/MUMBAI/PATNA: Congress president Sonia Gandhi was brought to Delhi on chartered flight from Varanasi when her fever took a turn for the worse on Tuesday because she couldn’t get an air ambulance on call.

Medical evacuations (medevacs) are not just in short supply but even those that offer services can’t move patients at night because most airports do not have the facilities to land at night.

Arguably India’s most advanced med-evac systems, Medanta’s Flying Doctors India cannot operate at night from smaller cities. “Though we can fly at any time, we end up transporting patients during the day as lifting patients from smaller airports at night is not feasible,” said Dr Yatin Mehta, chairman, institute of critical care & anaesthesiology, Medanta-The Medicity.

On an average, Medanta does two of Delhi’s three-four medical evacuations in a day, though the requirement is for at least double the number given the high number of super-speciality hospitals in and around Delhi.

Delhi has six private operators that provide chartered flights for medical emergencies, and each operator gets between 10-15 med-evac queries a day.

“Not all queries get converted as there are several factors involved, such as the availability of an airstrip for landing near the place from where the call is made, availability of aircraft and cost of transport,” said Dr Jagdish Kumar Gupta, operations head of the Delhi-based Aeromed International Rescue Services Pvt. Ltd. (with inputs from Ruchir Kumar in Patna)