A registered nurse and director of clinical operations at Medcair, a Brisbane-based medevac service, Clayton Dragona shares insights and anecdotes on the business — and passion — of flying sick and injured Aussies back home. How did you get into this line of work? I worked for more than a decade as a nurse specialising in paediatric intensive care at a few different hospitals in Brisbane. For some of that time, I was part of a helicopter retrieval service, flying out to the country to rescue children who required emergency medical care. So when the opportunity came up to do the same thing internationally, I didn’t need much convincing. The pay is a bit better, but the real bonus is the prestige. Do you recall your first international rescue? I’ll never forget it. We had to evacuate a prematurely born baby and the mother from Shanghai to Auckland. The parents were on their babymoon when the mother went into premature labour. The baby was at a good hospital and wasn’t in any immediate danger, but according to the rules in China, the mother was only allowed to see the baby for 10 minutes a day. You can imagine the distress it was causing her. She just wanted to get home with her baby. And your most challenging evacuation? There have been so many, though one that comes to mind was a lady in Bali who was very sick with multiple organ failure. We had to do a lot of things to keep her alive; she was fully ventilated. Another time, there was a gentleman in the US who also had multiple organ failure. I had to fly there on a commercial airline and help the hospital prepare him for transport. We had to fly to Samoa on an American jet, then transfer him on to our jet and take him the rest of the way to Brisbane. I was with him bed-to-bed, every step of the way.
How much do air evacuations cost? A lot. We use Learjet 60s and outfit them with top-end medical equipment that turns them into an ICU (intensive care unit) in the sky. The medical stuff is not crazy expensive but the jet sure is. It costs $3 million to $6m to buy a Learjet and around $7000 an hour to keep them in the sky. An evacuation from Bali to Brisbane can cost anywhere from $150,000-$200,000. For Perth it’s a bit less, around $100,000-$150,000. Which means if you don’t have travel insurance, you’re screwed? Honestly, if you can afford a holiday overseas, you can afford travel insurance. I would never leave Australia without travel insurance because if things go wrong and you’re thrust into a healthcare system that you’re not familiar with, that has different standards and where nobody speaks English, it can be very scary. Do you ever help sick Aussies who don’t have travel insurance get home? We can’t fly people home for free or we’d go broke very quickly, and then we’d be of no help to anyone. But sometimes we do rescues at cost price and find volunteer medical staff. Normally in these cases, the patient’s family raises money on GoFundMe or a wealthy friend or relative steps in to help. What’s the most common destination for medevacs to Australia? We go anywhere in the world where people travel. We recently did one in Russia, and another in Japan. But Bali is our biggest market because Australians love Bali. In a lot of those cases people get injured because of motorcycle accidents, though we’ve also had cases where people were just standing by the side of the road and got sideswiped by trucks, and kids who fell out of hotel windows. What’s the best part of your job? One thing I get a lot when I meet people who are sick or injured overseas is that they’re so happy to hear an Aussie accent and to meet a healthcare professional they can trust that they give me a hug. Seeing the relief on their faces, that look on their face that says the nightmare is over, is incredibly rewarding.
medcair.com.au
