MANY people are surprised to learn that the air ambulance service receives no public funding and has to rely on donations, club members were told.
“We couldn’t run without public support and each aircraft costs £4,500 a day, about £1.5m a year, that’s a tiny fraction of the NHS budget,” said Toby Hazan, himself a volunteer for the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Air Ambulance.
The charity is currently being supported by Gosport and Fareham Soroptimists and will benefit from the club’s fundraising this year.
They operate an average of two to three flights a day and transfer patients to the nearest suitable hospital that can cater for their needs so they might be taken outside Hampshire to Salisbury or Oxford.
“A lot of people think we automatically take patients to Southampton General but that’s always not the case,” said Toby.
The service currently runs in daylight hours only but their aim is to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Fifty per cent of flights have a paramedic plus a doctor on board and this means procedures can be carried out in situ, often a vital lifesaver. For example, they carry blood on each aircraft so that transfusions can be done at the site of an incident. Again, they want to have a doctor aboard 100% of their flights and are negotiating with the NHS to achieve this.
“The NHS funds half the cost of each doctor and we’re trying to get them to pay the whole amount,” he said.
Aircraft are leased “and as this is a fixed figure we know exactly how much it will cost.”
He ended his informative talk by introducing another air ambulance volunteer James Heath, a serving police officer who decided to start fundraising for the charity when he learned that they were given no official funding.
Along with 38 other people he took part in a trip to scale Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa, and they raised the fantastic sum of £180,000. James showed a video diary he had made of the climb, at times uplifting but also gruelling, as many of the walkers suffered altitude sickness. In fact, only ten people actually made it to the summit. What an achievement.