Lord Beaverbrook visited us at our helipad last week in recognition of his support for the charity through the Beaverbrook Foundation. 

The Foundation, which supports charitable causes both in the UK and overseas, has generously committed to donate £20,000 per year for the next three years to our Institute of Pre-Hospital Care (“The Institute”). The money donated will support two students with £10,000 each per annum, as part of the scholarship programme for our Intercalated BSc (“The iBSc”) in Pre-Hospital Medicine. 

Our Chief Executive Officer, Graham Hodgkin, addressed guests at this year’s London’s Air Ambulance Christmas Carol Service:

Spreading festive cheer in the capital, we hosted our annual Christmas Carol Service this week (14 December), filling the enchanting St Andrew Holborn Church with the sound of Christmas to raise funds to support our work. Over 250 guests attended, and over £10,000 was raised from the evening. 

This month we have welcomed two lottery winners to our helipad in recognition of their support — Lynda Stevens, with her husband Ron, and Frank Colet, with his wife Marion. 

Both scooped the top prize of £1,000 in our weekly lottery, which raises vital funds each year for the charity. They are one of the 39,000 hopefuls across London who donate to us to be in with a chance of winning a cash prize. 

We were delighted to be the beneficiaries of MBN Events ‘Sporting Speaker of the Year 2015’ lunch on Friday 27 November, which raised just under £16,500 for the charity. 

The lunch in central London welcomed familiar faces of the sporting world to its stage, including former England football player Paul Gascoigne and former England rugby union player Austin Healey. Funds were raised through a live auction, where prizes included an England 1966 World Cup shirt, signed by the only player to score a hat-trick in a World Cup final, Sir Geoff Hurst. 

Inaccurate reports in the media are stating that London’s Air Ambulance airlifted actor Harrison Ford at an incident in Buckinghamshire last summer. It was in fact the county’s serving air ambulance — Thames Valley Air Ambulance — that attended the scene. 

To view Thames Valley’s Air Ambulance’s statement see here. 

Cyclist Paul Heath has taken on the mighty Death Valley Challenge, cycling 391km across the desert and raising over £6,000 for us and Midlands Air Ambulance Charity. 

In just five days, Paul rode the dramatic and uninhabitable landscape, which included 11,000ft high mountain ranges, plummeting to 282ft below sea level, and in temperatures ranging from 36°C to -3°C. Located in Eastern California, the valley is the hottest and driest area of North America, and renowned for being home to one of the toughest cycle routes in the world. 

Our City headquarters has moved to a new location in Aldgate. The new office, on Mansell Street, is now closer to our helipad facilities at The Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, where our clinical and aviation teams are based.

The move was helped by a donation of £241,000, which was awarded from Libor funds in February of this year to go towards our new office premises. 

The building, where we occupy the 5th floor, is owned and also occupied by CIPFA — the Chartered Institute of Public Finance Accountancy.

Last night we collected two key awards at the Air Ambulance Awards of Excellence 2015. Our life-saving dispatch app, developed in partnership with EE and Mubaloo, won the ‘Innovation’ category and Consultant, Dr Gareth Grier, won ‘Doctor of the Year’. We were also runner up in three other categories. 

The longest secondment in the history of London’s Air Ambulance has come to an end. For more than eleven years, Graham Chalk has worked as the London Ambulance Service Clinical Liaison Officer at London’s Air Ambulance — working as the Lead Paramedic and the main point of contact between the charity and the London Ambulance Service. He has personally selected, trained and mentored all paramedics who served with London’s Air Ambulance since 2004.