Air ambulance & repatriation
When the distance is the emergency
Some patients do not need a different treatment, they need a different hospital, and quickly. Our flight service moves them there with the same standard of care they would have had if they had never left the ward.
0 min
Typical time to airborne
0+
Transfers flown each year
0
Island airfields served
0/7
Flight desk staffed
What we actually do
An intensive care bed that happens to fly
A transfer is the most exposed part of a patient's care, because everything familiar is left behind. We plan it as a clinical episode in its own right, not as transport.
We fly patients into Lifewell for treatment we can give and they cannot get locally, out to specialist centres when someone else is better placed, and home again once they are well enough to travel. The decision is always clinical first.
If flying is not in a patient's interest we say so plainly, and help arrange the road transfer or the local care that is.
On board
What travels with the patient
Everything below goes on every relevant tasking as standard, rather than being something you have to ask for.
Intensive care in the air
Transport ventilators, syringe drivers, invasive monitoring and blood products, so a ventilated patient is looked after exactly as they were on the ward.
Our own retrieval crew
Every flight carries a retrieval consultant and a flight nurse from this hospital. Nobody is handed to a crew who has never met the case.
Neonatal and paediatric
A transport incubator with its own ventilator and warming, escorted by the neonatal team, for babies who need a specialist unit fast.
Cardiac and stroke pathways
Direct handover into a catheter lab or stroke unit, with the receiving team briefed and waiting before the aircraft is on the ground.
European repatriation
Getting someone home after an illness or accident abroad, including the ground ambulance at both ends and the paperwork insurers ask for.
One coordination desk
A single number, answered by a clinician, that stays with the case from the first call through to the handover at the receiving hospital.
How we get there
Two aircraft types, one crew standard
Which one flies is a clinical and geographic decision, made on the call, not a menu you choose from.
Europe-wide
Fixed-wing air ambulance
A pressurised cabin configured as a single-patient intensive-care bay, for longer transfers and repatriation flights where cabin altitude matters clinically.
- Stretcher loading without tilting the patient
- Oxygen and power for the full sector, plus reserve
- Room for a relative to travel alongside
Attica and the Aegean islands
Helicopter retrieval
For island and mountain tasking where landing near the patient saves more time than anything that happens later, including transfers straight onto our own pad.
- Scene and hospital-pad landings
- Winch-capable crew for difficult access
- Typically airborne within thirty minutes of tasking
Arranging a flight
From the first call to the handover
Families and referring hospitals get the same process and the same phone number.
Step 1
One call starts it
You, a hospital, or an insurer calls the flight desk. A retrieval consultant, not a call handler, picks up.
Step 2
Clinical assessment
We speak to the treating team, read the notes and imaging, and decide honestly whether flying is the right thing at all.
Step 3
Crew and aircraft go
Aircraft, crew, equipment and landing permissions are arranged in parallel rather than one after another.
Step 4
Bedside to bedside
The same crew stays with the patient from the sending ward to the receiving one, and calls the family once the handover is done.
Babies fly with their own team
A neonatal transfer is not a small adult transfer. The transport incubator carries its own ventilator, warming and monitoring, and the neonatal consultant who stabilised the baby is the one who travels with them. Wherever the aircraft and the family's seats allow it, a parent comes too.
Cost and insurance
Most flights are paid by a travel or health insurer, and we deal with them directly. You will get a written quotation before anything is committed, and we will tell you honestly if a road transfer would serve the patient just as well for a fraction of the cost.
Clinical urgency is never held up while funding is sorted out.
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