IAHM is principally active in the management of patients coming from developing countries who need highly specialized treatment that cannot be provided in the hospitals in the patients’ home countries.

Collaborating with the humanitarian NGOs, IAHM uses the following operative stages:

• Contacts with local sanitary structures;
• Selection of the pathology;
• Evaluation of type of action;
• Possibility of providing the treatment in loco;
• Analysis of degree of post-operative assistance in loco;
• Contacts with IAHM;
• Clearance of formalities for transfer;
• Hospitalization in specialized structure;
• Repatriation and follow-up.
  

Two aspects are especially important in this procedure: the identification of the patients and the contact with the health structures.

The identification of the patients, in this phase, is the task of NGOs operating in loco, true witnesses of the real state of need of persons who are suffering and whose right to health and care it is their duty to safeguard. Their action makes the aid programme more concrete and rapid. Through their contact with the international professional organizations, they identify the specialized facility where the patient will be treated and see to his transfer. Many problems are thus overcome, e.g. travel expenses, entry visas, residence permits, and repatriation formalities

The patients, especially children, are in this way more protected, in their traumatic transfer to hospital structures in countries with a civilization that is often very different, and better safeguarded in the therapeutic procedures they will have to face, which can be very long.

Contacts with local sanitary structures: this refers to university and hospital structures in the individual countries that are the first to clinically evaluate the patients, draw up the relative therapeutic proposals, analyse the possibilities of surgical treatment in loco, and request the transfer to specialized foreign structures.

In this phase, contacts are created with the receiving structure, using, where possible, advanced information technology instruments, such as the Internet or teleconsultation, and protocols are prepared for post-operative treatment to be followed in the successive phases by the patient on his or her return home. Thus the foundations are laid for a profitable dialogue and a real co-operation between the local physicians and those in the specialized centres, and for the initiation of a technical and cultural exchange, i.e. the premisses for a more concrete programme of specialist training that is lacking in that particular reality.