Air Ambulance Aeroplanes
Life Flight
provides an intensive-care-level air ambulance service transporting critically
ill patients who urgently require specialist medical care only available in New Zealand's major centres.
Half of Life
Flight's air ambulance missions are to meet the needs of children and premature
babies who must be flown to Auckland for the urgent specialist care that they
are unable to get anywhere else in New Zealand. These children are from all over the
country and without speedy access and full intensive care team in the air,
would struggle to survive or recover from their traumas.
24 hours a day, seven days a week, Life Flight will ensure patients can be
flown under the watchful eye of an expert intensive medical care team. We also
enable their loved ones to fly with them on the air ambulance at this critical
time.
Without Life Flight's service some intensive care patients could not be flown
because there is no other service in New Zealand that could meet their acute needs. For
some of those cases this could effectively be fatal.
While some of the costs of this service are met by district health boards and
ACC, about 40% of costs are met by the community. This means that for every
mission flown, Life Flight requires around $2,500 from the community to make it
happen.
