So you can’t come and visit our air ambulance physically? No worries. Here is a description of where to find us, what our offices look like and some pictures. Our headquarters and operational base is at the Quits Aviation Terminal, Execujet Hangar 1, Murtala Mohammed International Airport, Lagos. The Execujet Hangar is the largest and most sophisticated fixed base operation hangar in West Africa.

Inside the hanger, our office is located on the 2nd floor of the Execujet building. It consists of a large airy boardroom, a crew lounge, an operations office for flight planning and emergency calls centre, an administrative office and most importantly, our medical equipment storage room.

Have you wondered what medical equipment are found inside an air ambulance? We have all the latest medical equipment needed to transfer a critically unwell patient from any site to any part of the world. Inside our equipment room, you will find perhaps, all the equipment found in an intensive care unit of a standard hospital facility. This basically makes our air ambulances a flying intensive care unit!

A listing of some of our equipment will include highly priced medical equipment like – Oxlog 3000 mechanical ventilators, Propaq Multi-parameter Patient monitor, Mindray patient monitor with AED, Infusion pumps, Oxygen cylinders, different medical consumables, and so on.

Our ‘Babypod’ is another of our priced equipment that ensures we are able to offer our neonatal/paediatric transport service. The ‘Babypod’ helps to keep premature babies safe, warm and comfortable during air ambulance transportation when they are critically unwell.

We recently acquired the Lifeport Patient Loading Utility System + Aerosled TS Stretcher system which is the latest in its category in terms of medical technology and costs quite a fortune. With this new addition to our equipment list, we are able to significantly improve patient’s comfort during transfer.

Our medical stretcher for commercial aircraft (Emergency Transport Unit) is also a highly priced medical equipment at the cutting edge of technology and the only one in the entire West African region. The ETU is a specially designed medical cabin that fits into a commercial airline creating a private chamber in which patient can be transported. It is an advanced custom designed unit that can transform a small section of a regular commercial flight into an intensive care unit in just minutes.

The services provided by the Flying Doctors Nigeria Air Ambulance Crew apart from its critical life –saving role – also reduce the cost for healthcare while increasing the quality. The air ambulance does this by bridging the gap between areas that lack state-of-the-art world class medical facilities and areas where these are readily available. With an efficient and reliable air ambulance service, governments may not need to build new specialist hospitals therefore, saving billions of dollars that can be used to provide other social services. Specialist medical skills that are scarce can also be concentrated in certain hospitals, which can be reached by air ambulances when required.

Our service also benefits the country in terms of medical tourism into Nigeria and thus brings in revenue for the country. Many times we have had to transport critically ill patients from neighbouring West African countries into the country to receive life-saving medical intervention. The government present policy of visa on arrival has gone a long way in making this possible.

So you have contemplating visiting our office any time soon? We have given you a virtual tour of what it looks like and hopefully, it will broaden your understanding of what an air ambulance is all about. To see all this and more, you can step into our hanger and our ground operations team will be glad to give you a full tour. And if you are lucky to come when one of our mission-ready aircraft is on ground, you might just get to see an air ambulance in operation.

Link to the full article on This Day by Olusanya Ademiluyi https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2018/12/28/a-day-with-the-flying-doctors/