Last year, Ms Hemma Rajendra found herself on an air ambulance trying to resuscitate a premature baby who was struggling to breathe even with the help of a ventilator.
The baby was one of a pair of twins who had been born prematurely. Both were suffering from heart and lung conditions and needed urgent care, and they had been airlifted out of Guangzhou, China, to head to Singapore for medical treatment.
Ms Hemma, 28, is a flight nurse with EMA Global, a Singapore emergency air transport service, and she flies around the world helping all kinds of people in dire medical emergencies.
Of the gripping incident with the infants, she told me: “At that point, all the team and I were focused on was saving the babies.”
In the end, the team chose to abort the flight to Singapore and reroute to a neonatal intensive care unit (ICU) in a country close by, a quick decision that saved both babies’ lives.
In just three years on the job, Ms Hemma, a Malaysian, has seen a lot. Her team has assisted in emergency evacuations involving a woman who had fallen ill with life-threatening respiratory symptoms while backpacking in Da Nang, Vietnam; a couple who had a major ski accident in Hokkaido, Japan; and a man who had been severely injured while travelling in the Arctic Circle, among others.
She is part of an air ambulance evacuation crew, which is a specialised team of pilots, paramedics, doctors, and nurses – known as flight nurses, air transport nurses or aircraft nurses – trained to provide critical care in transit.
“We provide bedside-to-bedside care. We accompany patients from the hospital room, or wherever they are, to their destination, whether it’s another hospital or the safety of their home while providing medical care throughout the journey,” she explained.
RIGOROUS AND INTENSE TRAINING
Ms Hemma, who is based in Singapore, has been a registered nurse for more than eight years. Before joining EMA Global, she worked in the ICU at a hospital in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for five years.
