In August 2021, AirMed International set out to complete a transport that most would consider impossible. They needed to move a COVID-19 patient on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) from the West Coast of the United States almost 8,000 miles to the United Arab Emirates – in the middle of a global pandemic. The trip required 14 days of planning and a whole lot of oxygen.
An article published in JEMS tells the story and revisits the challenges and lessons learned from what could easily be considered the world’s longest ECMO transport.