I saw a car driving up the Romford Road the other day with “Air Ambulance” written on the side.
It didn’t fool me, I know what a helicopter sounds like.

later….

Ok, there is a perfectly good explanation for why the Air Ambulance Service needs to send cars when it’s too dark or difficult for the helicopter to land. That makes sense. But it still doesn’t make sense to label the car as an “Air Ambulance” which is how it appears. They’re going to have to keep explaining that one over and over again to more and more people for as long as the silly branding exercise continues.

The other question that comes to mind is, in what circumstances is it more effective  to dispatch the London Air Ambulance replacement car service all the way from Whitechapel rather than a local Ambulance from the neighbourhood hospitals ambulance services?

London’s Air Ambulance is not just an airlifting service. We carry a highly experienced doctor on board, usually an Anaesthetist or A&E consultant. We also carry a specially trained paramedic. The service is about the expertise of the medical team. They are the only roadside trauma team who look after London and the helicopter is a means of getting them to the patient quicker as London is one of the most congested cities in the world. As well as being too dangerous at night to land, due to objects such as telephone wires, it is also not as busy and our rapid response vehicles can get about London quite quickly. The team generally patrol central London waiting for a call to a serious incident so they are positioned to get to any area of London quickly. They do not always base themselves at Whitechapel. We are different to a normal ambulance service. Our services will be called upon because our team performs procedures on scene that are normally only found in the hospital emergency department. This has included open chest surgery and bringing a patient back to life who would otherwise be clinically dead and this is a procedure only our team are able to do at the roadside.

One of our paramedics is always based in the London Ambulance control room, monitoring the thousands of 999 calls which pass there every day. As our trauma team are indispensible we have to ensure they are dispatched to the right jobs. The types of incidents they attend include serious road traffic collisions, industrial accidents, falls from heights, drownings and penetrative trauma. We have also attended every major incident in London since inception, including the 7th July terrorist bombings.

I understand that having London’s Air Ambulance labelled on the cars might be confusing, however when the service was initially set up we only had a helicopter. The cars were introduced as it was found there was a need for them as more people where dying unnecessarily at night time in London. Last year, with the help of donations from the public and LAS, we were able to go 24 hours. We probably will have to keep explaining this one over and over again but each time we have to; we are educating one more person as to what our operation is about and hopefully to the fact that we are a charity. We provide an imperative service to London and the cars are a very important part of our service.