Our Chair of Trustees, Gillian Bryce, looks back over the past six months.

2022 was a year of significant changes for Dorset and Somerset Air Ambulance. We said goodbye to Bill Sivewright, our CEO for 12 years, and also to Charlotte Routley, who took care of our finances from the inception of the charity. We are deeply indebted to them both for their years of service and hard work. We have subsequently been joined by Charles Hackett as our new CEO, who has proved himself to be a worthy successor to Bill, and Sarah Davies as our new Finance Manager.

As in previous years, our work was successfully recognised at the Air Ambulance Awards of Excellence, which you can read all about here. My personal congratulations go to Ian Mew, Pete Appleby and Wayne Busby for their wonderful achievements.

I think I can speak for everyone at the charity when I say we are looking forward to an exciting year ahead. There are lots of plans to continue the development and improvement of our service, which we are only able to do thanks to your wonderful support. Hopefully, we will see some of you at the events we have planned over the coming months.

Work is currently underway to increase the availability of our team and the service we provide, so that we can reach more patients in need of our help. We are also moving ahead with a project to support the growth of our airbase. The fact that we now have so many more personnel involved with delivering our service, both on the front line and in significant supporting roles for our patients and their families, means we have outgrown our current facilities. This situation clearly needs to be improved with a degree of urgency. However, it is critical that we ensure we have sufficient funds to support these developments and that we continue to deliver a service of which we are proud.

I would like to take the opportunity of welcoming two new trustees to the board. William Entwistle brings excellent knowledge from his experience as a Rear Admiral, Naval helicopter pilot and his work on other charity boards, while Martin Lyne has a background as a business leader and commercial specialist. Both their skills and insight will be a great asset for us all.

Some of our readers will have been cared for by our team, both during their time of injury or illness, or subsequently after, by our patient and family liaison nurses. Many of you share those traumatic times, so that we can share them with others and for that, we are really grateful. Your stories are amazing and inspire us all to do even more for the patients who need us within our local community. Thank you from us all!