Psychiatric Aeromedical Retrieval and Transferring the Extreme Psychiatric Patient

Christchurch 2010 , Aeromedical Society of Australasia meeting. Earthquake. conference theme – Going to the Extremes

Wow! It was a great meeting despite regular aftershocks and worse disasters were to come still in the months afterwards.

I won a prize for this talk on PSYCHIATRIC AEROMEDICAL RETRIEVAL – TOWARDS BEST PRACTICE

Dr David Bowie, Clinical director of Aeromedical retrieval for Flying Doctor Service of New Zealand and Flight nurse Delwyn Rattray, gave this excellent talk too on TRANSFERRING THE EXTREME PSYCHIATRIC PATIENT 

3 years on from that conference, certainly in Australia, I believe the aeromedical care of acutely agitated patients with a mental illness has improved in standards of sedation, restraint , monitoring and overall retrieval care.

This has been demonstrated by other Australian prehospital and retrieval services such as MedSTAR in South Australia and this presentation, KETAMINE USE IN THE RETRIEVAL OF PSYCHIATRIC PATIENTS,  by Dr Parsch

My own service, RFDS Queensland, has continued our research into the use of procedural sedation for this patient group and very promising results and feedback from our receiving centres and mental health care specialists.