A Queensland patient facing his "dying days" separated from family by a closed state border was reunited with loved ones by AirMed, transferred by an aircraft owned by a Dubbo-based airline.
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Air Link put its Beechcraft King Air to use for the delicate mission by sister company AirMed last week, AirMed senior flight nurse Beth Lui reported.
She said the family of the man turned to the patient transport service when they were unable to get a pass into Queensland, which closed it border with NSW in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"So the next best thing was for us to go and get him and bring him into NSW where he was able to cross the border," Ms Lui said.
"He was a gentleman who could have died at any moment, suddenly, and in order to get that family together, so he could have someone to spend his dying days with, they approached us as to how we could do it, and we managed to get him home to his only living relative, and that was a very satisfying job."
It was one of the latest examples of the "compassionate flights" undertaken by the company, which has aircraft at Bankstown and Dubbo, as well as patient transfer vehicles at 14 locations across NSW.
The non-emergency patient transport operator does private transfers, as well as work through its long-term contract with NSW Health, it reports.
Dubbo has in the past 12 months started featuring more prominently in the operations of AirMed.
Air Link general manager Ron O'Brien said as part of the two sister companies' owner taking the decision to increase engineering capacity at Dubbo, there would be two or three AirMed aircraft based at Dubbo.
Typically in the past decade there had been one.
"So there can be one here for maintenance, rolled through, so that when we have an aircraft at Bankstown that's going to need some servicing, we can bring it up to Dubbo, swap it out, and continue on," he said.
It gave extra capacity to respond from Dubbo to calls for AirMed.
"...Those changes have taken place in the past 12 months, basically, but they're ramping up now, particularly from an engineering point of view, we're getting ourselves more organised in terms of the two companies working more closely together operationally, so that there are those synergies that can come out of having the two companies working together, more cooperatively."
Air Link's recent addition of the King Air to its fleet also opens up opportunities.
Mr O'Brien, who took up the Air Link role in 2018, said the aircraft was able to provide the non-stop flight needed last week, and other medical repatriation flights in the future were possible.
"[The] Norfolks, Auckland, New Guinea, Indonesia, Fiji, all of those short-haul type flights, we've now got that capacity," he said.
"So we're about to take a really big broad step from where we are now, and we're really confident the future does bring a lot of opportunities for us, and we think we've got ourselves positioned really nicely with the assets, in terms of aircraft we've now got in our fleet.
"We'll look at other opportunities, but we actually have something now we can do now that we couldn't do six months ago."
Faye Wheeler
I have been a journalist for more than a decade and in that time I have been keeping Daily Liberal readers up to date about issues affecting them and what's happening in their community. Throughout my career I have covered a range of rounds and most recently I have been focusing on the business round.
I have been a journalist for more than a decade and in that time I have been keeping Daily Liberal readers up to date about issues affecting them and what's happening in their community. Throughout my career I have covered a range of rounds and most recently I have been focusing on the business round.
