Helicopter: Government sends explanations to INEM

The Ministry of Health refers to INEM any clarifications regarding the actions of patient transport helicopters in the case of the patient who took more than five hours to be taken from Covilhã to Coimbra.

“Clarifications about the helicopters must be requested from INEM,” an official source from the Ministry of Health told Observador.

On Sunday, the executive director of the National Health Service (SNS), Álvaro Almeida, had also already referred responsibilities for this case to INEM, at the same time as placing the responsibility for responding to questions related to the helitransport tenders on the Ministry of Health.

“The issue of pre-hospital transport is not a responsibility of the Executive Board,” said Álvaro Almeida in an interview with CNN Portugal. “Therefore, I have nothing to say on this subject, because this is a question that must be put to INEM, which is the one with this responsibility.”

SNS refers responsibility for delay in patient transfer to INEM

Faced with the journalist's insistence that the Government is responsible for the tenders related to helicopters, Álvaro Almeida reiterated: “But I am not the minister, I am not the Government.” In the same interview, he even said that he had “nothing to do with this contract”.

The incident, initially reported by SIC Notícias, occurred on Saturday. A 48-year-old man suffered a scooter accident in Paul, near Covilhã, and was rescued at the scene by firefighters, who transported him to Covilhã.

At the end of the day, the medical team that assessed him concluded that the patient would have to be transferred to the neurosurgery department at Coimbra hospital, due to the severity of the head injury. The two hospitals began contacting each other at 8 pm and, two hours later, the fire department was called to arrange the transfer between hospitals.

From then on, the problems began. The heliport service has already been awarded to the company Gulf Med, but until the contract is approved by the Court of Auditors, the Portuguese Air Force is providing night-time heliport services. The big problem, however, is that the helicopter that was used on Saturday night, an EH101 Merlin from the Air Force, was too big to land on the heliport at the Covilhã hospital.

Therefore, as the commander of the Covilhã fire brigade, Luís Marques, told SIC Notícias, it was requested that the patient be transported to the Castelo Branco airfield.

“An emergency ambulance was called with a medical team from the hospital who transported the victim to Castelo Branco airfield, where an Air Force helicopter was already there to transfer the patient to Coimbra,” said the official.

The helicopter headed to Coimbra, but had to land in Cernache do Bonjardim and then be transported by ambulance to the hospital. In total, the patient took five hours to travel between the two hospitals — a journey that would have taken less time if it had been done entirely by road.

If Gulf Med’s light helicopters had already been fully operational, the transport would have been made directly between the two hospitals in about an hour and a half — and the patient would have had contact with fewer different medical teams. In the end, the patient was only admitted to intensive care at the Coimbra hospital at 8 a.m. on Sunday.

In an interview with CNN Portugal, the executive director of the SNS explained that the decision to take the patient to a different hospital is part of the normal functioning of the Portuguese hospital network.

“The NHS hospital network, as is the case all over the world, has several levels. There are local hospitals and more specialized hospitals. Certain cases can only be treated in specialized hospitals. Therefore, what happened in this case, which I am not aware of, is that the Covilhã hospital understood that the seriousness of the matter required the intervention of a more specialized hospital, namely the Coimbra hospital,” he explained.