A Harvard professor of surgery says it would be of “great advantage” to Bermuda to have an on-Island air ambulance — for emergency medical evacuations and to get organ transplant patients to the US quickly.Dr Stefan Tullius, chief of transplant surgery at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, told The Royal Gazette a dialysis patient recently lost out on a donor kidney because of transport problems.The matching organ had already been harvested from the donor’s body and Dr Tullius said the woman wasn’t able to arrive in a “reasonable amount of time”, meaning doctors could not be confident the kidney was still suitable for transplant.“The distance from Bermuda to Boston is not an issue, per se,” he said. “But the lack of transportation is.“In winter time, there are two commercial flights per week [to Boston]. During the summer [when there are daily flights] it’s a bit easier, but it’s still a hassle.“I guess that does not only refer to the transplant population; that also refers to anyone else with an emergency.”The transplant patient told this newspaper she waited for three years for a matching kidney and was “extremely, extremely disappointed” to lose out.“You just wonder when is the next one going to come,” said the 42-year-old. “You hope it’s going to be soon because you were called but in reality you don’t know.“Just the quality of life of having a transplant: it’s a big difference to being on dialysis. I might not get one for another five years.”The woman, who wished to remain anonymous, previously had a donor kidney which lasted for 11 years.Three years ago, she went back on dialysis, meaning three-hour sessions at the hospital, three times a week.The woman registered with the New England Organ Bank and, on March 25 this year, got the call she’d been waiting for in the middle of the night.“Boston called about 2.30am or 3.30am to say they had one available,” she said. “So we got the [King Edward VII Memorial Hospital] social workers and insurers involved to try and get an air vac.“Unfortunately for this one, I had a limited amount of time to get to Boston because it was out of the body already. I had to be there between eight and ten o’clock in the morning.“The social workers and insurance people would call throughout the night and say ‘nothing yet’. Finally, insurance called and said they were unable to find an air vac.”The woman, a civil servant on Government Employee Health Insurance (GEHI), said she wasn’t told if that was because they couldn’t get one on time or “if it wasn’t in their dollar amount”.But she claimed the cost of a one-off transplant operation would ultimately prove cheaper for her insurer than constant dialysis fees.“The fact that we don’t have an air ambulance on-island at this point prevented me from getting this transplant,” the woman said. “When you have a kidney, your life is so much freer.”KEMH does not carry out transplant surgery and the majority of transplant patients from the Island have their operations at Brigham.The hospital carries out an average of five transplants on Bermudian patients per year, with three already in 2012.D Tullius said one recent case involved a male patient in his fifties.“He was just fortunate that the offer came on a day when a commercial flight was available. It happened in such a time sequence that he could take advantage of a commercial flight and could arrive at the Brigham on time.”The doctor, an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, explained that transplant patients must wait for an organ which is compatible with their tissue antigens.“After years of being on a waiting list, they look forward to an offer,” he said. “The longer you wait, the higher your probability of getting an organ.”He said once a compatible organ was identified, it was important to get the patient to the hospital in a “timely fashion”.“Sometimes we know prior to the organ procurement if an organ is going to become available and sometimes we only hear about it after the organ is procured.“Sometimes the medical instability of the donor would affect the quality of the organs. Sometimes things need to be rushed.”Dr Tullius said an air ambulance stationed in Bermuda was extremely valuable in such situations.He added: “If you look at this in a more general view, the opportunity for an ambulance flight coming out from the Island would be a great advantage overall and not only for the transplant operations.“For any patient with an emergency which you can’t deal with on the Island, that may be an issue. Bermuda had one before. It did really make things a lot easier.”GEHI manager Keisha Tuckett said she could not comment on the specifics of any GEHI case.Health insurers Argus and BF&M didn’t respond to a question about whether any of their members have lost out on an organ due to transport issues.Catherine Kempe, from Colonial Medical, said: “To date, certainly within the last five years, we have not had a client lose a transplant opportunity due to not being able to get there on time.”www.brighamandwomens.org.