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A vital
20 hours
Memories of the first International SOS mass evacuation.
PATRICK Deroose is General Manager at
International SOS’s Corporate Assistance
Department. A trained nurse, he has been
with International SOS since 1993.
Soon after he joined, Patrick was part of a
team sent to care for the victims of a serious
road accident on Bali. Here he remembers
how events unfolded.
“A couple of weeks after I started work
with International SOS there was a terrible
crash on Bali. A group of elderly French and
Belgian tourists were traveling in a
mountainous area when their coach tumbled
into a ravine.
Many of the passengers were injured, some
seriously, and several people were killed.
Local services arrived at the scene as quickly
as possible and took the injured passengers to
the local hospital.
As soon as they were informed of what
had happened, the French insurance company
contacted International SOS and the
Singapore alarm center was immediately
alerted.
Knowing that local medical facilities
would not be sufficient to deal with the
situation, our mandate was to bring the
patients to major trauma centers in Singapore
for treatment and repatriation.
Combining resources
The operations team at Singapore quickly put
together a plan that combined the resources of
three International SOS alarm centers:
Singapore, Jakarta and Bali. The Singapore
and Bali teams would triage the patients (that
is, determine their injuries in order to decide
the order and urgency of treatment) ready for
repatriation. The Jakarta team would provide
the necessary equipment and personnel for
the aircraft.
One of our Bali-based doctors was
immediately sent to the hospital in Bali to
assess the situation. Understandably,
conditions at the busy emergency room of
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