The East Anglian Air Ambulance (EAAA), established in the summer of 2000, is a charity that provides air ambulance services – helicopter emergency medical services (HEMS) – for people in the Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk regions (East Anglia). EAAA enables highly-skilled paramedics and doctors to undertake life-saving missions by air or car.
Since the charity was launched in 2000, it has undertaken more than 25,000 missions, and in the process has touched lives and ensured emergency care is provided to those that require it most. EAAA has a crew of critical care paramedics and doctors who use two helicopters that are based at the Norwich and Cambridge airports. The air ambulance service operates all year round and covers a population of more than 3 million.
EAAA is committed to delivering a quality service to the people, and it embraces the challenge of continuously innovating and improving said service. It also acknowledges that it has been successful as a result of charitable contributions from supporters across the country. One such supporter is Thomas Noel Collister Jackson, a solicitor who is involved with a few charities and is a regular donor to the East Anglian Air Ambulance.
Missions
In early January 2019, the East Anglian Air Ambulance team undertook mission number 25,000. It was an incredible milestone for sure, one that the charity was delighted to have accomplished, even though it meant someone needed emergency care. Still, it highlighted how vital the air ambulance service has become to the region.
Each helicopter has a crew that consists of two pilots, a critical care paramedic and a doctor who provide expert medical care directly to patients. On most occasions, their services are required for medical emergencies and life-threatening emergencies. Afterwards, the helicopter transports the patient to a hospital for further care.
In 2020, EAAA will celebrate its 20th anniversary, an even more remarkable milestone. In 2018, the service attended to more than 1,600 patients, all of whom were critically ill. Most incidents the air ambulance crew responded to were cardiac arrests and road traffic accidents.
The charity has a control centre located in Chelmsford that has staff on call twenty-four hours a day, every day. The staff, which consists of a critical care paramedic and National Health Service (NHS) Trust dispatcher, are trained to handle emergency calls and ensure that a helicopter is quickly mobilised when an emergency arises. At the scene of the incident, the doctor (part of the crew) decides which mode of transport to use (land or air).
Thanks to their training, the EAAA crew has the expertise to provide a hospital emergency room level of service to a patient. They can undertake just about any procedure that would be performed at a hospital, and once the crew is confident with the treatment provided, they can ensure the patient gets to the hospital. About a third of the patients the EAAA attends to have to be flown to a hospital, mainly because of the severity of the condition or how remote the location is.
Events
The support that the East Anglian Air Ambulance receives comes entirely from charitable donations and fundraising events. Some of these events include Run, Walk, Leap & Cycle, which consists of marathons and cycle races of varying distances across East Anglia; TREK 24, which is a 24-kilometre or 24 mile trek that stretches across the Norfolk coast; and Only The Brave (OTB), which is a six or 10-mile challenge course that features plenty of mud and activities (climbing, crawling, running and scrambling). For this particular event, the charity requests participants to raise £50 each.