Today, we are one of a few air ambulance services operating with a critical care team both during the day and at night using our AW169 helicopter and critical care car...

Last year, we were tasked to 2,004 incidents and treated 1,364 patients. We administered pre-hospital anaesthesia to 162 patients, sedation or strong relief to another 172 patients and 38 patients were given blood and plasma to treat their life-threatening bleeding. 183 patients were transferred directly to the regional major trauma centres and 18 time-critical patients were transferred from acute hospitals to regional specialist centres.

Every month the team undergo extensive training days to help them be the best they can be. This is based on the Pre-Hospital Emergency Medicine (PHEM) curriculum used by the Faculty of Pre-hospital Care and often involves simulated exercises, which focus on a particular challenging aspect or medical condition that the team may come across during a mission tasking. Each scenario is subsequently discussed and debriefed in detail, looking particularly at any critical decision-making points.

Further training days involve collaboration with our inter-agency colleagues on intense and challenging scenarios. These are of incredible benefit for joint working; one exercise involved more than 100 people in a large-scale lowland search and rescue simulation whilst another saw the team working with the fire service and hazardous area response team to provide critical care to a patient in a confined space such as a collapsed bomb shelter.

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