Calls for air ambulances soar, but tough norms make medical evacuation harder

MUMBAI: A Kolkata family that flew their 10-year-old son to Mumbai for an emergency brain tumour surgery, a middle-aged man from Raipur who flew home after a bypass surgery in Mumbai, a seriously ill elderly woman with liver and kidney ailments who had exhausted her treatment options at a Hyderabad hospital and so left for her home in Indore. These are some of the patients who took the nearly two dozen air ambulance flights operated over the past four weeks as domestic flights and trains were suspended across India due to the lockdown.

Air ambulance operators say despite calls for medical evacuation soaring during the lockdown, the tougher norms have badly hit families who need to fly down patients to different cities.

On March 23, the ministry of civil aviation banned all airline flights, but medical evacuation flights by charter operators were permitted. On April 15, the ministry issued a clarification stating medical evacuation flights “should not be permitted without the explicit permission of the government”.

“During normal times, all that was needed to operate a medical flight was a hospital discharge summary and clearance from the aviation regulator. Now, we need permission from collectors or district magistrates of both arrival and departure cities, letters from the doctor and hospital giving patient’s details, an NOC from the state health department, which