Medical repatriation by country
Every corridor has one factor that dominates the planning. In Spain it is the sheer volume of routine cases; in Thailand it is distance; in the United States it is the bill. These pages set out what we actually see from each, and what changes about the decision.
Europe
Austria
Austria is the Alpine corridor where the card in the patient's wallet actually helps. The mountain problem is identical to Switzerland's. The payment position is not, and the difference is worth understanding before the season starts.
Read the corridor →Belgium
Belgium is the corridor where flying is usually the wrong decision. The tunnel is quicker bed to bed, gentler on the patient and cheaper, and it is still the second thing people think of.
Read the corridor →Bulgaria
Bulgaria sells the cheapest ski week and the cheapest beach week in Europe, and the caseload reflects exactly that. Young patients, high-energy injuries, and definitive care that is usually several hours away in Sofia.
Read the corridor →Croatia
Croatia's caseload happens on water or beside it. The hospitals are good and they are on the mainland, which means the hardest part of most cases is the distance between the patient and the nearest one.
Read the corridor →Cyprus
Cyprus is straightforward until it is not. A case in the south behaves like southern Europe. A case in the north raises questions about routing and documentation that no other Mediterranean corridor does.
Read the corridor →Czech Republic
Prague produces a category of case that no other European corridor produces in the same volume, and almost all of it happens after midnight.
Read the corridor →France
France is the one corridor where the aircraft is frequently the wrong answer. A road ambulance through the tunnel avoids two transfers, an altitude change and an airport.
Read the corridor →Germany
Germany is the corridor where the clinical case for moving a patient is weakest and the commercial case for watching the bill is strongest. Both facts are routinely missed, and they point in opposite directions.
Read the corridor →Greece
Greece is not one corridor, it is a mainland and about two hundred inhabited islands. The island cases are the ones that need planning, and they are most of them.
Read the corridor →Hungary
Budapest generates the ordinary European caseload plus one that almost nowhere else does, because a large number of British visitors come here specifically to have surgery.
Read the corridor →Iceland
Iceland is three hours away, inside the arrangements a GHIC covers, and still capable of taking two days to move a patient. Everything difficult happens between the injury and Reykjavik.
Read the corridor →Ireland
Ireland is the corridor most often assumed to be simple. The distances are short and the systems are familiar, which is exactly why cases here get left to drift while more distant ones get managed.
Read the corridor →Italy
Italy is the corridor where the state system is genuinely good, which changes the question. It is rarely whether the patient can be treated locally. It is whether the pathway they now face belongs at home.
Read the corridor →Malta
Malta is easier to work than any other Mediterranean corridor and it has a harder ceiling. Everything is in English and the medicine is familiar, right up to the point where the island cannot offer what the patient needs next.
Read the corridor →Netherlands
The Netherlands produces a caseload shaped by bicycles and a clinical culture that treats intervention as something to justify. Both surprise British insurers, and only one of them is a problem.
Read the corridor →Norway
Norway is two hours from the UK and can take two days to leave. Almost every difficulty on this corridor happens north of Bergen or on a ship.
Read the corridor →Poland
Poland is the corridor least like a holiday. Most of the caseload is people visiting family, working, or travelling for treatment they arranged themselves, and each of those raises a different question before the clinical one.
Read the corridor →Portugal
Portugal's caseload is older than its visitor numbers suggest. A large resident British population means more cardiac, stroke and fragility fracture, and fewer resort injuries, than the Algarve arrivals figures imply.
Read the corridor →Spain
Spain produces more UK repatriation cases than anywhere else, and the short flight makes it the corridor where the wrong decision costs the most for the least reason.
Read the corridor →Switzerland
Switzerland inverts the usual corridor. The flight home is ninety minutes and the clinical care is excellent. The exposure is the account, and it starts running from the moment the helicopter lifts.
Read the corridor →Turkey
Turkey is two corridors wearing one name. The holiday cases look like Spain. The medical tourism cases look like nothing else, and they are the ones that go wrong.
Read the corridor →Asia Pacific
Australia
Australia is the corridor where the honest answer is most often to finish the treatment where the patient is. The care is excellent, the reciprocal agreement is real, and the journey home is long enough that it should only be made once.
Read the corridor →Bangladesh
The capability is in Dhaka. The British patients are usually not, and that gap is the whole corridor.
Read the corridor →Hong Kong
Hong Kong removes almost every problem a repatriation usually has. What is left is a long flight and a decision about whether it is needed at all.
Read the corridor →India
India has some of the best hospitals in Asia and some of the most limited, sometimes a few hours' drive apart. Which one your member reached is the single most important fact about the case.
Read the corridor →Indonesia
Bali is the corridor where the first move is often not the flight home. Where local capability runs out, a short evacuation to a regional centre buys the stability that makes a twenty hour journey survivable.
Read the corridor →Japan
Japan has some of the best medicine in the world and one of the hardest systems for a foreign insurer to work with. The obstacle is almost never clinical. It is language, documentation and an expectation that patients pay as they go.
Read the corridor →Malaysia
People travel to Malaysia for surgery. That single fact should change how any repatriation decision from Kuala Lumpur is framed.
Read the corridor →Maldives
The Maldives is the corridor where the patient is furthest from help while appearing to be in the most comfortable place on earth. A resort island is a hotel with a clinic, and the nearest hospital is a flight away.
Read the corridor →Nepal
Nepal is the corridor where the retrieval costs more than the repatriation, and where the bill deserves reading twice.
Read the corridor →New Zealand
New Zealand covers visitors for accidental injury under a national scheme, which surprises most insurers. It does not cover illness, and it does not shorten a journey home that is the longest we run.
Read the corridor →Pakistan
This is a family corridor, not a holiday one. The patient is usually a British national three weeks into a two-month visit, and the clinical problem is rarely an accident.
Read the corridor →Philippines
The Philippines is an archipelago with two cities that can treat a serious case. The clinical question is usually straightforward. Getting the patient to a hospital that can answer it is not.
Read the corridor →Singapore
Singapore is the only corridor we run where patients arrive as often as they depart. It is where South East Asia sends its serious cases, which makes it both a destination for treatment and an origin for repatriation.
Read the corridor →Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka is a small island that takes a long time to cross. Most of the caseload is on a touring itinerary, and the distance between the patient and Colombo is measured in hours of road rather than kilometres.
Read the corridor →Thailand
Thailand is the corridor where distance is the clinical problem. Eleven hours in the air is not a longer version of a Spanish flight; it is a different decision.
Read the corridor →Vietnam
Vietnam is fifteen hundred kilometres end to end and the caseload is spread along all of it. The question is rarely what the patient needs. It is which of the two cities that can provide it they are closest to.
Read the corridor →Middle East / North Africa
Bahrain
Bahrain is small enough that everything is thirty minutes away, which removes the ground problem that dominates most corridors and leaves a clean clinical decision.
Read the corridor →Egypt
Egypt's cases cluster in resort towns several hundred kilometres from the country's best hospitals. The first decision is almost never about the flight home.
Read the corridor →Morocco
Morocco is three and a half hours from London and a long way from a British hospital in every other sense. The flight is short, which is fortunate, because almost everything that precedes it takes longer than people expect.
Read the corridor →Oman
Oman sells wadis, mountains and empty desert, which is the point of it and also the problem. The hospitals in Muscat are good. Most of the country is a long way from Muscat.
Read the corridor →Qatar
Qatar is the corridor where the honest answer is often that the patient should stay where they are, and the second most useful thing we do is say so.
Read the corridor →Saudi Arabia
Most British cases in Saudi Arabia are pilgrims, not tourists or workers. That single fact sets the age, the season, the presentations and the difficulty of every part of the case.
Read the corridor →Tunisia
Tunisia is a three hour package destination with a private clinic sector built for European visitors and a hospital system that most insured patients never see. Which one the patient lands in decides the case.
Read the corridor →United Arab Emirates
The UAE has hospitals as good as anything in Europe. That makes the question not whether the care is adequate, but why the bill is what it is and whether the patient should be moved at all.
Read the corridor →North America
Canada
Almost every British visitor assumes Canada works like the NHS. It does not work like that for them. There is no reciprocal agreement, visitors are billed, and the daily rates sit closer to the United States than to Europe.
Read the corridor →Mexico
Mexico combines a wholly private payment position with a nine hour sector. The clinical case is often straightforward. The commercial case moves faster than anywhere else we work, which is why the payment position has to be settled in hours rather than days.
Read the corridor →United States
The USA is the only corridor where the cost of the treatment routinely exceeds the cost of the aircraft. Managing the bill is not a side task here. It is the case.
Read the corridor →Africa
Cape Verde
Cape Verde sells a six hour package holiday to a group of islands where serious medical capability is scarce and the options for leaving are few. That gap is the whole corridor.
Read the corridor →Ghana
Ghana is the West African corridor that behaves itself. Good direct capacity, manageable ground movement, and a short enough sector that a stable patient rarely needs a jet.
Read the corridor →Kenya
Kenya has the best developed bush retrieval network in Africa and some of the longest distances to use it over. The patient is often further from a road than from an airstrip, which changes the order of the plan.
Read the corridor →Mauritius
Mauritius has better hospitals than most island destinations and it is still an island. The cases that go wrong are the ones where nobody asked early enough whether the patient needed something the island does not have.
Read the corridor →Nigeria
The flight is short and reliable. Everything that determines how this case runs happens on the ground in Lagos, before anybody reaches an aircraft.
Read the corridor →South Africa
South Africa has private hospitals a British consultant would recognise and no safety net beneath them. The clinical question is often whether to move at all. The commercial question starts the moment the ambulance chooses a destination.
Read the corridor →Tanzania
Tanzania is three corridors in one country. A mountain that makes people ill by design, a safari circuit reached by air, and an island that looks like a beach holiday and behaves like a remote posting.
Read the corridor →Caribbean
Antigua
Antigua is better connected than it is equipped, and the region's instinct is to send serious cases north to Miami. For a British patient that is the wrong compass bearing.
Read the corridor →Barbados
Barbados is the easiest Caribbean corridor to work and it carries the oldest visitor population. The systems are familiar and the patients are frequently in their seventies and eighties, several weeks into a winter stay.
Read the corridor →Cuba
Cuba is the one corridor where the doctors are rarely the constraint. What they can get hold of is.
Read the corridor →Dominican Republic
Punta Cana is a wall of all-inclusive resorts with a private clinic sector built around them. The care is transactional, the payment expectations are immediate, and the capability ceiling arrives sooner than the resort suggests.
Read the corridor →Jamaica
Jamaica generates more cases in people visiting family than in tourists, which changes the age, the comorbidity and the insurance position of almost every patient on this corridor.
Read the corridor →St Lucia
St Lucia is a nine hour flight from home and a short hop from the nearest tertiary care, and on a serious case the short hop comes first.
Read the corridor →Not listed?
We coordinate repatriation worldwide. These are the corridors we see most often from the UK and the ones where the differences are worth writing down, not the limits of where we work. If your case is somewhere else, the model is the same: assess the patient clinically, match the transport to the medicine, and coordinate bed to bed.
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