Assistant medicine
The assistance medicine provides medical help for stays abroad, during which there is a communication problem in the language . The assistance doctor is then, so to speak, the interpreter and cooperation partner between doctor and patient .
execution
The person seeking help contacts an assistance doctor (mostly from his own language or culture ) who has interdisciplinary medical knowledge (in particular surgery , internal medicine , psychiatry , paediatrics , emergency medicine, etc.) is also multilingual . This doctor contacts the treating doctors at the emergency site (hospital, hotel room, camping site, etc.), gets an idea of the situation on site and then informs the patient or their relatives in their native language about the result of this medical consultation. This is important in cases in which the patient speaks neither the language of the country of destination nor any other language (English or similar) or if the treating doctors do not speak any of the common lingua franca. Sometimes the medical assistant has to call in an interpreter in order to establish contact with less common languages.
Area of responsibility
From simple therapeutic advice to vaccinations and return by air ambulance , the medical assistant organizes all the necessary measures either until no further help is required or until the patient has been referred to the doctors at his home hospital. Advice on epidemics in the travel destination or on tropical diseases is also part of the medical assistant's field of activity. Findings about previous illnesses, allergies , medications, etc. often have to be asked for and passed on by the family doctor , or suitable doctors have to be identified on site and contact made with them.
This demanding job requires doctors who, thanks to their medical knowledge and language skills, can get a vivid picture of the situation on site and assess the necessary measures. Ideally, the medical assistant himself knows the destination country and its medical standards and options.
Since this assistance is not cheap because of the high organizational effort, it is advisable for travelers to take out appropriate insurance in good time before they start their journey. Because a possibly necessary return transport of a seriously ill patient under intensive medical care with the ambulance jet z. B. from New Guinea to Frankfurt / M. can quickly reach financially threatening proportions; Costs of 50,000 € for such a flight are not uncommon. Even with mass evacuations with the MedEvacs , the mediation of the patients to be evacuated is in his area of responsibility, via the responsible embassy . In an acute emergency, initial contact with the medical assistant can then be established directly via an emergency number with 24-hour service.