How To Get an Older Relative From a Boston Hospital Onto a Flight Home

Your mother is in a Boston hospital and the family has decided she is going home to Florida, or to Texas, or to Arizona. The discharge planner says she is medically cleared to travel. Nobody has told you who actually moves her, and there is not one answer, because this is four separate jobs.

Who does what?

Families lose days to this, so here is the map first.

• Clearing her to fly. Her physician and the hospital case manager. Nobody else can do this and everything downstream waits on it.
• The ground legs. Hospital room to the terminal door here, and the terminal to the front door at the other end. This is us, on the Massachusetts side.
• Inside the airport and on the plane. The airline. You request wheelchair assistance when you book, and their staff takes her from the terminal to the gate and onto the aircraft.
• Clinical care in the air. An air ambulance company, or a commercial medical escort service that puts a nurse or paramedic on a scheduled flight with her. Separate industry, separate quote.

Most families do not need the fourth one. If she can sit upright, manage a long day, and does not need a drip or monitoring, she flies as a regular passenger with airline wheelchair assistance and the whole thing is a transportation problem, not a medical one.

What we actually do

We are a Massachusetts ground transportation and home health aide company. On a trip like this we cover:

• Pickup from the hospital room or the rehab floor, not the lobby. Our drivers do door through door.
• Wheelchair accessible vans. She stays in her own chair, secured, up the ramp.
• Stretcher transport when she cannot sit up for the drive.
• Stair assistance at the house, with two trained staff and an electric stair chair, for the apartment she is leaving or the one a relative is collecting her from.
• A home health aide for the hours around the flight, which is usually the part nobody budgeted for and the part that saves the day.
• The run to Logan, and the same in reverse if she is arriving in Massachusetts rather than leaving.

Our Logan Airport transportation page covers the airport run on its own, and stretcher transportation covers the lying down version.

What we do not do, so you are not surprised

We do not book flights, we do not operate aircraft, and we do not put clinical staff on a plane. Our aides are trained, background checked and insured, and they are not nurses. They do not administer medication, change dressings, or make clinical judgments.

If somebody tells you they can do all four jobs out of one office, ask them which part they subcontract and to whom. It is a fair question and the answer tells you a lot.

Can she fly on a commercial plane at all?

Her doctor decides, not you and not us. Ask the case manager for a written fit to travel opinion before anybody buys a ticket. That one piece of paper is what the airline, the insurer and the receiving facility will all ask for, and getting it late is the single most common reason these trips slip a week.

Two things to raise with the airline's own medical or special assistance desk, not the regular booking line. First, oxygen. Airlines generally do not allow a personal oxygen cylinder in the cabin, and an approved portable concentrator plus advance clearance is the usual route, with battery requirements of their own. Second, whether she can be moved from a wheelchair into a seat, and whether she needs an aisle chair. Both answers change what you book.

What if she needs a stretcher or monitoring in the air?

Then you are looking at an air ambulance, or a commercial medical escort who travels with her on a scheduled flight. Expect that to be the largest single line in the whole budget, and expect to need the physician's records to get a quote.

Ask the hospital case manager for names first. They have done this before and they know which companies turn up. Also ask whether her health plan, her travel insurance, or in some cases her consulate or embassy will contribute, because repatriation is sometimes covered and families almost never check.

Our part stays the same either way. We get her from the hospital bed to the aircraft or the ambulance, on time and without anybody being carried down a staircase.

Discharge day is the part that goes wrong

A hospital says morning and means two in the afternoon. A flight does not wait. That mismatch is what strands people, and it is worth planning around rather than hoping.

• Do not fly the same day she is discharged if you can avoid it. One night at home or at a hotel near the airport removes most of the risk.
• If it has to be the same day, book an afternoon or evening flight and give us a pickup window rather than a time.
• Get the prescriptions filled the day before. A pharmacy queue at four in the afternoon has ended more of these trips than weather has.
• Arrange who meets her at the other end before she leaves. A flight that lands with nobody waiting is the worst version of this.
• Send her medication, her records and her insurance cards in a bag that stays with her, not in checked luggage.

If the discharge itself is the problem rather than the flight, see rides home from rehab on discharge day and whether a hospital can discharge someone to an unsafe home.

What does our side cost?

• Wheelchair accessible transportation: $115 each way , $230 round trip within five miles, then $2 a mile . A hospital in Boston to Logan is a short run. A hospital in Springfield to Logan is a long one, and the mileage is where the number moves.
• Stair assistance: $200 a visit , two trained staff and an electric stair chair.
• Home health aide: $45 an hour , one to eight hours a day, no minimum contract and no assessment fee.

We publish these so a family three time zones away can build a budget at eleven at night without waiting for an office to open.

For case managers, discharge planners and international patient offices

If you are placing a patient who is leaving Massachusetts, we are the ground piece you can hand off and stop thinking about. Wheelchair and stretcher capable, door through door, stair assistance where there is no ramp, and an aide if the patient cannot be left alone between discharge and departure. Around 30,000 trips a year, offices in Woburn, Springfield and Brockton.

We also take the reverse direction, which is the one people forget. A patient flying into Logan for treatment at a Boston hospital needs the same chain in the other order, and a family arriving from abroad usually has nobody to call.

Send referrals to info@careremedyinc.com or call 781 957 8076 and ask for dispatch.

Where to start today

Three calls, in this order. The case manager, for the fit to travel opinion and the discharge date. The airline's special assistance desk, for the wheelchair request and anything about oxygen. Then us, for the ground legs at this end.

Call 781 957 8076 or email info@careremedyinc.com. Tell us the hospital, the flight time, whether she can sit up, and whether there are stairs at either end.

Nothing here is medical advice, and airline rules on oxygen, mobility equipment and documentation change and differ by carrier. Confirm the clinical questions with her physician and the travel questions with the airline before you book.