Being one of the few air ambulance companies that can undertake long journeys with a single stop because we make use of long range aircrafts for our operations, we got a request to evacuate someone on a long distance flight from Senegal to China recently. Patient had sustained a spinal injury from falling from a height!

Falls from Height

Falls from height are a leading cause of fatal injury, and can result in injuries like broken limbs, fractured skulls, broken back.

Falls could occur at home or in the workplace.

Working from ladders, scaffolds and platforms are obvious examples, but there are many more activities where people are required to work at height, such as roof work, working over tanks and pits, at the edge of elevated structures, or on top of vehicles or trailers.

If a person falls from a height above two metres, they are very likely to sustain serious injury.

Risks

The main hazards associated with working at height are people falling and objects falling onto people below. These may occur as a result of inadequate edge protection, or from objects in storage being poorly secured. So, the falling person sustains injury and whoever they fall on is injured as well. A lot of these injuries are fatal. Those that do not result in death, take a really long time to heal.

Workers in maintenance and construction and many other people in a variety of jobs could be at risk of falling from height at work. Examples include: painters, decorators and window cleaners and those who undertake one-off jobs without proper training, planning or equipment. People who work in construction, road transport, manufacturing, oil and gas, to mention a few, are at huge risk.

What to Do

It is very important both to prevent these sort of injuries as well as have a medevac cover in place should one occur.

The patient who had this injury that necessitated the call to us had the option of medical evacuation because he had a medevac cover in place. More so, transporting spinal injury victims requires our expert air ambulance flight team to understand the complications that occur and this is all covered in our 3 week long air ambulance physicians orientation program.

Do you work in any of the industries listed above? Are you at risk of sustaining injuries? Ensure you get a medevac cover today.

About the Flying Doctors Nigeria Air Ambulance Service

• Flying Doctors Nigeria is an air ambulance service that is dedicated to the specialist transfer of patients from low levels of care to specialist centres. We operate from Lagos, Nigeria and transfer patients between African countries like Ghana, Liberia, South Africa, etc as well as the UK, Italy, Germany, America and all over the world.
• We also offer medical evacuation plans which provide medical evacuation and treatment in the event of an emergency for a small yearly fee.
• Other examples of long distance air ambulance transports we have undertaken include; Abuja to Abu Dhabi, Lagos to Egypt, Nigeria to South Africa etc.
• Read more about our air ambulances services here and our medevac cover here.
• To learn more about us and our services, send us an email at sales@flyingdoctorsnigeria.com.
• Or visit our website at www.flyingdoctorsnigeria.com