RPM showcases unified command vision and advanced rescue solutions at ADIPEC 2026

Abu Dhabi: When airspaces closed, a patient in Dammam who needed to reach Bangalore had no flight to take. So, the journey went overland first.

“We moved the patient by road ambulance to the Saudi border, exchanged to a UAE ambulance, brought the patient to Dubai airport, flew to Delhi, and then on to Bangalore,” Prashanth M V, Vice President for business development at ICATT Response Plus. “It took almost 20 to 22 hours, but the patient has to remain stable until the end.”

That kind of improvisation is what Response Plus Medical (RPM) wants to sell as a single package. At ADIPEC 2026 in Abu Dhabi, the group is showing every part of its business at once: site clinics, ground and air ambulances, rescue training and risk consultancy, built into models of an offshore rig, wind turbines and a collapsed building.

“Prior ADIPECs, we always used to focus on one of the areas, but this time we wanted to put everything on the cards,” Rohil Raghavan, Chief Executive Officer of Response Plus said.

Changed jobs

For the people on RPM’s sites, the past year has changed the job. Medics who once dealt mostly with chest pain, stroke and heat exhaustion are now also trained for blast injuries.

“We had to train them into shrapnel wounds, cuts, injuries, to make sure they are in step with the current situations,” Raghavan said.

The reason, he said, is that the sites they serve cannot afford to stop. RPM runs clinics at refineries, airports and desert locations far from any hospital, including around 200 sites for ADNOC.

“If we do not service them properly, these industries will stop working. We know the importance of what we do because it’s important for the industry of the country and for the economy.”

He points to the pandemic. “Because of the number of tests we did, not one day did ADNOC have to stop services because of an outbreak.”

Remote ultrasound  

Preparation is the thread running through the group’s work. Steven Wines, CEO of Prometheus Medical, RPM’s training and consultancy arm, said the past year confirmed it.

“It’s a lesson reaffirmed, which is that preparation is everything,” he said. “In a crisis, you don’t rise to the occasion. You fall to the level of your training.”

For an oil and gas operator in Oman, Prometheus staged a bus crash with 35 casualties, then watched how the company responded. It built a training plan around what went wrong and ran the exercise again two months later.

“If you’re running one of these major oil and gas companies, you can demonstrate that you have done everything conceivable to prepare for that risk,” Wines said.

Offshore, the same thinking applies to a single worker with chest pain. A nurse who is not a cardiac specialist can scan the patient with remote ultrasound while doctors onshore watch live and guide the scan. It tells them whether the person needs an expensive helicopter evacuation, or just indigestion tablets.

Never take shortcuts

RPM runs close to 550 ground ambulances and is scaling up its air ambulance service after receiving EURAMI accreditation and it works with partners including Falcon, LA Aviation and ICATT, the CEO of RPM said.

ICATT’s Prashanth said every evacuation is different, and the region’s closures have made that plain. When a patient needed to leave Iran and the aircraft could not go in, the team flew via Lebanon instead.

“We don’t know what is there tomorrow, so we have to be prepared for everything.”

The crews are anaesthetists and intensive care doctors, many with specialist aeromedical training, who plan for what might go wrong at each leg. The cost of that readiness is rising.

“Particularly from last year, with these disturbances, costs have gone really high, and insurance has gone really high,” he said, but patient care comes first. “We never take any shortcuts. Let the cost come next.”

RPM has also built a reserve of staff, vehicles and supplies it can deploy at short notice. “We don’t know when and where it will be required, and at that time you can’t say, ‘I’ll purchase two ambulances, just hang on.’ For the sake of the nation, we must put extra buffers across,” Raghavan said.

Preparation is everything

The stand’s models are Raghavan’s argument in miniature. The turbines stand for rescue medicine for wind farms. “If something happens to someone on top of a turbine, you can’t bring a helicopter in. There’s a methodology of how it’s done, and Prometheus does the teaching,” he said. The collapsed building represents search and rescue teams that have worked in disaster zones such as the earthquake in Turkey.

What he wants next is a much larger command centre, which he calls the UMOC, with a live view of every RPM service across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the UK. “This is my dream,” he said.

RPM already operates in Norway, the UK, Saudi Arabia and Oman, and is preparing to start in Qatar. Raghavan believes the market is waiting for a provider that does it all.

“Some may do ambulance service, some clinic service, some air evacuation. Now we are bundling the whole thing into one,” he said. “Once you are outside the hospital, there are infinite prospects.”