13 Jan 2025
In November 2024, our advanced trauma team – who serve London 24/7, 365 days a year – treated 157 patients.
We’re dispatched when someone is so critically injured they do not have time to get to hospital. Bringing the emergency department to the scene, our team can provide potentially life-saving treatments on the roadside. In this month, this included administering 27 rapid sequence intubations, 18 blood transfusions, 14 femoral arterial lines, one thoracotomy (open chest surgery) and more. Some of these procedures, only our crew can administer on scene in London.
If you’d like to read a story about someone who benefitted from our roadside care, you can read Jim’s story, he received a blood transfusion along with other life-saving interventions, after he was hit by a lorry while cycling.
We cover the entire area within the M25 and can reach anywhere in this parameter within 11 minutes. During November, it was the borough of Lambeth that we attended to the most, followed by Tower Hamlets and then Ealing and Greenwich.
Once the patient is stablished, our clinicians usually accompany them to the nearest major trauma centre in a road ambulance. This month 38 patients were taken to The Royal London Hospital (36 per cent), 33 to St Mary’s Hospital (31 per cent), 20 to King’s College (19 per cent) and seven to St George’s (seven per cent).
Assault was the most common mechanism of injury in November, resulting in 44 patients (28 per cent). Medical-related injuries resulted in 30 patients (19 per cent), falls 24 patients (15 per cent), transport-related injures 24 (15 per cent) and accidents nine (six per cent). There were also 26 patients with other or unknown mechanisms of injury (17 per cent).
We’re here for the 10 million who visit, live and work in London and we’re continuously developing and innovating pre-hospital care, so that we can save a life tomorrow that we weren’t able to save today. But we’re a charity, reliant on public support to keep us flying.
This year, can you help support your only air ambulance service? Please sign up to donate today.