TMAS services from Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain and the UK have come together with the ITF Seafarers’ Trust (ITFST) to release the Telemedical Maritime Assistance Services 2025 Collaborative Report. A selection of relevant anonymized medical data from these services was gathered and are presented in the Report.
Luca Tommasi, Grants Manager at the ITFST said “We are very pleased with the ongoing collaboration among European TMAS services. The purpose of our TMAS group is to promote cooperation and the exchange of best practices between TMAS services, thereby enhancing the quality of care and support provided to seafarers.”
The top four causes for seeking medical assistance among seafarers are digestive/dental, musculoskeletal, skin complaints or general medical enquiries. Similarly to 2024 these four issues are broadly comparable to each other in number.
The data shows that medical assistance is more likely to be sought for health conditions relating to illnesses rather than to injuries and that most cases (60.2%) result in a recommendation of treatment on board. Only 7.1% of the emergency medical advice cases resulted in a recommendation for urgent disembarkation.
Dr Fernando Gómez-Muniz, Specialist in Occupational Medicine at the Instituto Social de la Marina (Spain) said “We are very pleased with the ongoing collaboration among European TMAS services. The purpose of our TMAS group is to promote cooperation and the exchange of best practices between European TMAS services, thereby enhancing the quality of care and support provided to seafarers.”
This is the third published TMAS collaborative report, presenting and analyzing the total combined activity of the contributing services. The participating TMAS services vary in size and the types of ships and seafarers supported, but despite the variation in activity the development of a common, standardized, database has the potential to facilitate significant improvement of telemedical services supplied to seafarers worldwide.
We are actively seeking to further expand participation of other national telemedical advice services and considering opportunities for further analysis of the data to support work in other areas such as informing the contents of the ship’s medical chest and revision of the ILO/IMO Guidelines on the Medical Examination of Seafarers.
