5 key elements of patient aftercare

Here at EMS, we’re passionate believers in “bed-to-bed” medical transports.

What does that mean? Essentially that, when you greenlight a repatriation, we’ll take on everything that happens next.

Doctors, tickets, travel passes, schedules, permits, route plans… literally anything that has to happen on a repatriation, from start to finish, you can leave to us. We think this is only way to comprehensively look after the patients and families in our care. For more detail on what bed-to-bed means in practice, you might like to check out this blog:

Medical repatriation: why is a “bed-to-bed” service so important?

In one sense, though, the phrase “bed-to-bed” isn’t totally correct. And that’s because the service actually goes beyond the final bed part. We also believe in great aftercare – that is, once your patient has reached their destination home or hospital for the next part of their treatment.

Here are five key ways we do that for every transport.

Arrival

While a transport is underway, you’ll be receiving regular updates from us during the journey. How’s your patient doing right now? What’s the current location of the ambulance? Are we still expecting to arrive on schedule? Knowing the answer to these questions removes some of the worry from the process. As we near your final destination, though, we’ll be keeping in touch with the doctors at your receiving facility too (if they’re heading to a clinic or hospital). By this time, we will have already told them to A) prepare a bed and B) when to expect us. As we get closer, we’ll phone ahead to check everything’s ready.

Handover

Handing over to the local doctors is a crucial part of the transport. We want to make sure this happens as smoothly as possible. If it’s a hospital destination, your patient will usually be taken to A&E first (which is a normal part of the protocol). The EMS doctors or paramedics will then meet with the departmental team and make sure they’re fully up to date on your patient’s current condition and needs. They’ll receive a Medical Transport Report, which details your patient’s vital signs during the journey, whether they’ve had any medical interventions or medication, and so on. For completeness, we’ll send you a copy of this Report too.

On-call

The EMS team won’t leave until they’re satisfied that the patient has had a full and proper handover to their local contact person or medical team. Once they have left, though, we’re still here for you. You can get in touch with our repatriation experts if you need help with anything related to the transport. For instance, you might need us to send you some details for an insurance application, or follow-up support for a Visa on Arrival. If you need to speak to us any time, just call or message your case supervisor and they’ll be glad to help.

Call-back

Around 24 to 48 hours after the journey, we’ll be in touch again to see how everything’s going. Is your patient comfortable and getting all the help they need? Is there anything else we can assist you with from our end? Taking responsibility for patients means we often build up close relationships with them during the journey – as one reviewer put it after their transport, “you have now become our family!” – so we always like to know how they’re getting on once we’ve left.

Feedback

Talking of reviews, we take customer feedback very seriously indeed. EMS holds the ISO 9001:2015 accreditation for quality assurance, and that means we rely on our customers to tell us how we did – good or bad – so we can use their views and ideas to expand and improve our services. We encourage patients’ families to document their experiences on our Google Reviews page, and our team will respond to every individual post. Ultimately, great aftercare comes down to a continuous hunger for improvement – when it comes to caring for a loved one, you wouldn’t expect any less.

Interested in reading more about how we care for patients? You might find this article helpful…

What makes a good medical repatriation company? 10 tips for choosing the right organisation

Contact us

Need to talk? We’re here to help. Just get in touch with our friendly experts by phone, email or WhatsApp. Head to our Contact page for the details. You can also get a free, no-obligation cost estimate for your repatriation with our online pricing calculator.