Our Services
We are proud to offer a highly ethical, clinically led service of the finest quality, and at an affordable cost. Although we consider our aeromedical transport service to be truly global, our own fleet of business jet aircraft ambulances operate throughout Africa, Europe, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia.
Further afield, our highly trained and experienced flight medical crew are carried on commercial airlines or chartered jets. We also offer wing-to-wing medevac missions with our partner services where distances and/or time dictate crew and aircraft change-overs en route.
Phoenix Air Ambulance excels at high dependency and complex critical care transfers, and routinely manages patients of all ages and in need of all levels of care. We are able to provide a comprehensive bed-to-bed service coordinated by our highly experienced operational team.
However, where clinical, logistic or legal requirements demand a tarmac (airport) collection of the patient, Phoenix follows best practice guidelines to ensure this out-of-hospital transfer takes place safely and efficiently.
Critical Care Ambulance
Although transfer of ICU patients between hospitals is a routine part of healthcare delivery, the decision to transport a critically ill patient is based on an assessment of the potential benefits of transport weighed against the potential risks. Critically ill or injured patients are usually transferred to obtain a higher or more specialized level of care that is not available at their current location. This is especially true in remote areas and regions where healthcare facilities are rare and/or ill equipped and staffed to manage complex patients, but there may well be other contributing reasons for the transfer, or the transfer may simply be for repatriation purposes.
Critically ill patients offer the most complex challenges of all the transfers that we undertake, and these missions require detailed planning and preparation, as well as high levels of skill, knowledge, and teamwork. By definition, critical care patients are patients being treated on an intensive care unit (ICU) and require advanced organ support such as respiratory ventilation, renal (kidney) replacement therapy or significant cardiovascular or coronary support. However, for the purposes of planning critical care ambulance missions, the Phoenix Medical Team also considers patients who may be thought to be borderline, or who are at risk of deterioration in flight. These include any patient who has been recently discharged from an ICU, as well as most patients who are currently being managed on a High Dependency Unit (one step down in severity to Intensive Care). There may also be some overlap with patients who are being retrieved as immediate or delayed (primary) emergency cases from remote areas to ‘first-call’ appropriate medical facility.
Standard Critical Care Air Ambulance Transports
We are clinically led by experienced and expert intensive care consultant doctors and nurses who are also well trained and qualified with air ambulance expertise. In fact, all of our clinicians maintain their medical, nursing and critical care skills by working part-time in prestigious hospitals in Nairobi and they are therefore able to keep abreast of new developments in medicine, especially in recent times with the significant changes and development that have occurred (an continue to occur) in the SARS -cov-2 pandemic. Our medical operations staff work with in-office and on-call intensive care consultants who look at, and risk assess, every individual patient transport request in order to suggest, and provide, the most appropriate level of care in flight. Our decisions are based, not only on expert opinion, but also on our in-house policies and procedures, accurate clinical decision-making charts, and compliance with international standards.
Phoenix Air Ambulance patients receive, at the very least, the same level of organ and system support, nursing care and monitoring as they are receiving in their current hospital. However, more often, they receive a step up in the standard of care due entirely to the quality and expertise of our flight medical staff, and the state-of-the-art equipment they use on board our dedicated air ambulance aircraft.
Advanced Critical Care Air Ambulance Transports
The care of some patients is rendered even more complex for reasons such as age, the presence of highly contagious infection, or the requirement for an in-flight treatment modality that is beyond the scope of a ‘standard’ critical care flight medical team. Examples of these specialist air ambulance missions include:
- Ventilated patients who, by virtue of having a highly contagious infection, must be transported in an isolation chamber.
- Patients who require additional respiratory support using the system called ECMO (Extra-Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation). This is otherwise sometimes referred to as ‘heart-lung bypass’.
- Patients who require additional cardiac (heart) support by devices that increase the power of the heart to pump blood around the body. This may include Ventricular Assist devices (VAD) and Intra-Aortic Balloon Pumps (IABP).
- Neonatal and premature babies that require specialist care and transport in an incubator.
- Infants and small children that require specialist care and transport in a baby pod or pediatric stretcher
Phoenix provides medical and/or nursing staff for all these categories of advanced critical care transfer, but, for some cases, we work with colleagues from local specialized teams who, once training alongside our flight medical personnel, are then able to join the Phoenix flight teams when required for air transport missions.
Emergency Air Ambulance
An emergency air ambulance is a dedicated medical retrieval aircraft which responds immediately or at the earliest possible time, given the constraints of geography, cross-border politics, security issues and time of day. Timing is key, since services, such as airport/airstrip opening hours, acquiring landing permissions, coordinating ground transports, availability of fuel, air traffic control services, and border/customs control are all vital to the success of each mission.
These flights are called ‘Primary missions’ when the patient is picked up from a place where there are no proper emergency care facilities. In such circumstances, the first real emergency medical care is that which is provided by the medical team on board a Phoenix dedicated air ambulance. If for geographical, political, security or timing reasons, the mission can not be launched immediately, the mission is started at the earliest possible time. These flights are called ‘Delayed Primary missions’, and they are very common in Africa and in other wilderness areas around the world, as well as on remote islands and on vessels at sea. The clinical principles of a Delayed Primary mission are exactly the same as for an urban HEMS (Helicopter Emergency Medical Service) Primary mission.
Whether ‘Primary’ or ‘Delayed Primary’, the concept is to retrieve the patient from a location where there is no access to advanced emergency care, and then to fly them to a location where the injuries or illness can be managed safely. The patient is then referred on to the relevant specialty teams in an appropriate tertiary hospital (one that covers all major medical and surgical specialties, and has comprehensive diagnostic and treatment facilities ‘under one roof’).
Phoenix dispatches only flight doctors and nurses with the appropriate training, qualifications and experience on these flights. In many respects, our medical personnel are acting with a wider scope of competence, in that they must have skills in advanced pre-hospital emergency care, as well as their critical care skills and general medical and nursing expertise. Our flight medical teams carry all the equipment required to stabilise and optimise the treatment of out-of-hospital casualties, regardless of their injuries or illness, their age, or the body systems and specialty of their symptoms.
In effect, this approach is even an improvement on a conventional Emergency Room (A & E or Accident and Emergency Department), simply because our dual trained emergency care practitioners with critical care training and experience can instigate very urgent resuscitation and other procedures long before the patient arrives in the destination hospital. Our emergency aeromedical retrieval teams provide expert and appropriate emergency care to save life, limb and eyesight. The act of ‘bringing hospital care to the patient’ is well known to save lives, reduce complications and shorten hospital in-patient duration. Our nurses and doctors have the skills and equipment to make a huge difference to patient outcomes in these situations when we can provide better care in the air than is found on the ground.
Commercial Airliner Transport
The Phoenix Medical Department mantra is “We will find you a medical transport solution”. Although we own and operate our own fleet of aircraft, we are aware that a dedicated air ambulance is not always the best solution to the patient’s transport needs. In our search for the best bespoke solution to your request, we aim to offer you the best possible quality for the best possible price. So, price alone may be a factor that rules out the use of a dedicated air ambulance aircraft. Other reasons may include the distance to the patients final destination, the time it takes to get there, or the logistics and/or politics of the journey.
There are many examples of when it would be more appropriate to dispatch one of our expert medical teams to escort a patient being carried on a normal commercial airliner. This option is often used for patients who require one or more medical escorts, but who are not critically ill and can preferably walk or use a wheelchair to board the aircraft. Although stretchers are available on some scheduled commercial airliner flights, other options for comfort (if a stretcher is not really needed) might be a ‘flat-bed’ seat in business class, or a row of 2 to 5 seats in economy class, depending on need. There is a lot of flexibility in the use of commercial airliners for medical transport but there are also a lot of potential disadvantages. These include the fixed nature of the flight (unmovable take off times, smaller choice of destinations, no influence on the cabin environment) as well as an assortment of other issues, such as no privacy, restrictions on what equipment and medical consumables can be used on the airliner, access to power supplies to run the medical equipment, etc.
These missions are called Commercial Airliner Medical Escort (CAME) flights and they will often prove to be the best option for the patient. Phoenix Air Ambulance will always offer impartial advice if requested. We use the same in-flight medical personnel for these CAME flights as for the dedicated air ambulance flights, and our nurses and doctors have the complete range of state-of-the-art equipment to choose from, just as if the mission was being flown on one of our own aircraft.