The Devon Air Ambulance reached another landmark in their 27 year history of attending it’s 27,000th rescue mission.
On 11 February the service was called to help a rural patient, in an agricultural location, who had suffered chest injuries, after being crushed by a cow.
Nigel Hare, Operations Director for Devon Air Ambulance said,
“Due to patient confidentiality we don’t know much about the patients we help. For our 27,000th mission we were deployed at 1531 from a 999 call and were in the air at 1534 hours. The flight to scene took just 11 minutes.”
He added
“The advantage of traveling by air is that we don’t get caught up in traffic jams or in narrow country lanes. This means we get our critical care specialist paramedics and doctor to the patient as quickly as possible, which can make a huge difference to patient outcome. On this occasion, after assessing the patient and assisting the land ambulance crew with treatment, the patient’s condition was best suited to travel by road to the RD&E Hospital in Exeter.”
Heléna Holt, CEO of Devon Air Ambulance said
“The last couple of weeks has seen us reach several landmarks; from assisting our 100th patient in the dark, opening the 100th Community Landing Site, to announcing that 2018 was our busiest year ever, helping 1,109 patients. But we don’t have time to rest on our laurels as we are constantly looking at the service and seeing what would make our patient care even better.”
She added,
“I would like to take the opportunity to say a huge thank you to our amazing supporters, donors, staff, crews and volunteers across the community. None of what we do would be possible without any of them.”
About Devon Air Ambulance
Devon Air Ambulance Trust is the Charity which raises the funds to keep Devon’s two Air Ambulances flying.
The service is 27 years old and is funded by the generosity of the community, businesses and friends of Devon.
Last year it cost £7.5 million to keep the service flying, helping 1109 patients, of which 11% were children. The Exeter based aircraft operates until 2am every day and since it started flying into the hours of darkness over 118 patients have been helped at night time, using the growing network of Community Landing Sites.
You can read more about the community landing sites here
