Arranging travel support for a client with severe health issues

Rudy De Kort / 22 June 2022

At my office in Canada, we get calls from personal assistants, executive assistants and travel agents.

When one of their clients is of advanced age, but still needs to travel, sooner or later they’ll face a common scenario, that sounds very familiar to us: ,,I am booking an international trip for my client. His health has declined lately, and he can’t really travel alone anymore. He doesn’t need an air ambulance or a doctor, but I am unsure how to manage this properly.”

Medical travel companion

As a Canadian provider of travel companions for hire and aeromedical care, we are often able to take the stress out of the situation. All of our so called commercial medical escorts or medical travel companions are professional flight nurses in the first place. They are trained to care for individuals onboard a plane. A crowded cabin at 36,000 feet is their workspace, so they are very familiar with all the challenges and options. When someone needs continuous support while flying, due to aging, or after surgery or illness, the services of a medical travel companion can be the missing piece to the puzzle. In fact, whether these passengers are considered “Fit to Fly”, or denied boarding by the airline, often depends on this type of arrangement.

Medical emergency onboard

Thirty times a day, somewhere in the world, an in-flight medical emergency is declared. It’s not really surprising: now more than ever, we see airline passengers who are 80+, or travelers of any age group with serious pre-existing conditions like dementia, heart disease or cancer. The added stress of flying doesn’t help with their daily struggles. There are also more ultra-long-haul flights, connecting cities at opposite sides of the world, non-stop. Nevertheless, many of these high-risk travelers will arrive at the airport unprepared. Most make it to their destination, with or without problems. Some get bumped off a flight. And some get into trouble and become part of the statistic.

More often than not, all it takes, to mitigate the risk of something going wrong halfway to the other side of the world, is having a trained set of eyes onboard who is able to recognize small issues, before they ever escalate. Hiring a flying companion comes at a cost, but it offers the best chance of a seamless trip.

Care needs while flying

We see travelers with a broad range of conditions: be it permanent disability after a stroke, or severe anxiety after a mental health crisis, or people who suffered a complication after surgery overseas. Some missions are time sensitive, for example someone who is terminally ill, with only a narrow window of opportunity to fly back home before getting to sick to fly. Others are planned well in advance, like in the case of an elderly expat who is transferred to a long term care facility, closer to family.

The degree of assistance can vary. When I say that we specialize in low-complexity medical travel, we mean that we transport people who are capable of flying safely on a commercial aircraft if we manage for example their incontinence, or their confusion. For these cases we don’t need to send an ICU-nurse with critical care gear. That also greatly reduces the cost of a mission. We are however licensed professionals, practicing to our full scope. So things like in-flight oxygen, symptom relief drugs and a stretcher onboard a commercial plane, can be easily arranged. People who were previously considered too sick to travel to a wellness retreat or a specialized treatment center, now have more options to get where they need to be.

Wing-to-wing, bed-to-bed transfers

No two missions are the same. Airport-to-airport transfers are common, for example in the case of a

young adult who is brought to an addiction treatment center overseas. Our nurse meets the family at check-in, and at the final destination someone else will be waiting. Later that week, that same nurse will take a cab and travel 300 kilometers across an international border to pick up an elderly client in a nursing home. Together they’ll travel 300 kilometers back to the airport in an ambulance, before boarding a transpacific flight. Around the same time, but in a different continent, one of our nurses will be doing a wing-to-wing transfer of a patient who is arriving on a private jet, and leaving on a commercial flight an hour later.

Rudy de Kort is a flight paramedic and the founder of Jet Companion, a Canadian provider of medically trained travel companions.

EVERY MILE WE FLY IS FOR THE PURPOSE OF REUNITING PEOPLE OR BRINGING THEM TO SAFETY