15 Dec 2023
In October 2023, London’s Air Ambulance’s advanced trauma teams – who serve the city 24/7, 365 days a year – attended to 150 patients.
In terms of the mechanism of injury, assault resulted in 42 of these patients (28 per cent), falls resulted in 25 patients (17 per cent), transport-related injuries 24 patients (16 per cent), medical injuries 17 (11 per cent) and accidents eight patients (five per cent). Thirty-four of our patients this month suffered other or unknown mechanisms of injury.
Providing pre-hospital care on the roadside for these people included administering 21 rapid sequence intubations, 18 blood transfusions, 11 femoral arterial lines, three thoracotomies and more. Some of these procedures – like blood transfusions and open chest surgery – can only be administered on the roadside in London by London’s Air Ambulance’s crew.
Our team is dispatched across the city, to London’s most critically injured, when they don’t have time to get to hospital. During October 2023, the team were dispatched the most to the borough of Lambeth, followed by Waltham Forest, Croydon and Ealing.
After our doctor/paramedic teams have stabilised the patient at the roadside, they usually accompany them in a road ambulance to the nearest major trauma centre. This month, 34 of our patients were taken to The Royal London Hospital (34 per cent), 27 to St Mary’s Hospital (27 per cent), 24 to King’s College Hospital (24 per cent) and 14 to St George’s Hospital (14 per cent). Twice during the month the team transported the patient back to hospital by air, but this is a rare occurrence.
If you would like to read September’s mission report to see how the months compare, please do so here.
We are here for the 10 million who visit, live and work in London and it costs £15 million per year to run our service. But we’re a charity, with 96 per cent of our income reliant on public support. Can you help support London’s only air ambulance today?