With only a small portion of Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) flights, medevacs may be considered the most crucial.
MAF PNG’s Bookings and Operations Officer, Serah Michael, shared that Medevacs are MAF’s priority. It's life and death in terms of saving a life in the remote areas of Papua New Guinea.
Medical evacuation, also called medevac or medivac, is the timely and efficient movement and en-route care provided by qualified and experienced medical personnel. Last year, MAF reached the flying medevacs and crossed the milestone of 5000 flight hours. In January this year, MAF PNG facilitated four medevacs. Each one started with a call from a health worker or an airstrip agent, and all emerged out of the blue.
MAF shared that when the calls first come in, the requests undergo a screening process to ensure that the need is genuine and urgent.
Once the medevac has been approved, the MAF Bookings and Operations team (MAF BOC) must work fast to provide the needed support. The MAF BOC team communicates with a receiving hospital to arrange an ambulance to take the patient for treatment.
“It’s a long process. We have to check if the pilot is checked at that particular airstrip, that an aircraft is available, that we have enough hours left in the day and more. We can’t just tell the pilot to ‘do this’ without containing all the information.
“Once cleared, either the pilot will divert from his original flight plan, or an aircraft gets launched specifically for the medevac. On arrival the pilot will communicate closely with locals to ensure the patient is seated or laid as comfortably and quickly as possible before flying to the assigned hospital locations,” she continued.
MAF confirmed that medevacs are funded through paths depending on the case, including village funds, global donations, funding from provincial health facilities, and more.
“Most of the rural people don’t have money to charter planes,” said Serah.
Training and investing in local health care through strengthening and equipping Village Health Volunteers or Community Health Workers remains a challenge within the health system.
MAF partners with several hospitals and Provincial Health Authorities to facilitate health patrols to remote communities. Thanks to funding of a total of 300 flight hours for medical patrols by MFAT/New Zealand Aid, MAF was able to facilitate more than 100 medical patrols to 50 villages in the last one and a half years.