‘As a team, we care for patients wherever they may be’

It’s a calm and sunny morning everywhere else in Bristol, but at the gates to the last remaining strip of Filton Airfield that hasn’t been built on, it’s windy – as always. It was the site of an airfield for more than 100 years, but now the only flights that take-off and land here are the local police helicopter and the Great Western Air Ambulance Charity. Inside the hangar, the team of dedicated doctors are a couple of hours into their shift and are ready and waiting in their orange flying suits for their first call-out of the day.

Tucked away from the roar of the A38, a handful of cars are scattered in the little carpark, the doors kept clear for a fleet of emergency vehicles, suitable for almost all eventualities, that reside here too. If the weather is too poor to fly, the medics take to the road instead to offer their expert knowledge in real life-or-death situations.

“We started running the response cars in August 2007,” explains critical care doctor Jules Blackham, nursing a cup of tea in a personalised air ambulance mug and munching a pastry in the team’s office. “This allowed us to train critical care paramedics. We launched the first aircraft in June 2008, first running five days a week and then seven, and now we are one of ten air ambulances in the country that trains doctors, which allows them to be supervised while being trained.” That first job, a decade ago, was a road traffic collision on the M5 near Weston-super-Mare; since then there have been thousands of call-outs and lives saved.

Jules has been with the air ambulance since its early days, and puts in four or five shifts a month on the helicopter, in addition to his day job as an A&E consultant at Southmead Hospital. During each 12-hour shift, three medics and a pilot work as a team, joined by up-to two trainee doctors – although trainee is a misnomer, as they have at least eight years of experience under their belt before embarking on this specialism. Many are employed at local NHS hospitals, and three of the unit’s 18 doctors are active in the military.

Dr Jules Blackham is one of 18 doctors on the Great Western Air Ambulance team

A huge, highly-detailed map of the area that the air ambulance covers stretches across one entire wall of the office, with a compass and a magnetic model helicopter on a string that can be pulled across to the location of the emergency, allowing the team to manually take a grid reference as well as receiving it over the radio. Major locations in their patch – which covers Bristol, Bath and Wiltshire, as well as parts of Somerset, Gloucestershire and the Forest of Dean – are marked on the map, including Bristol Airport but also Highgrove, Prince Charles’ residence near Tetbury. Despite it being such a massive geographic area, they can reach anywhere in their patch within 20 minutes, providing life-saving measures for those who need them most.

“As a team, we bring way more than a standard ambulance team can,” explains Louise Webster, a critical care doctor for five years who grew up just a stone’s throw from the Filton site. “We have the ability to provide very potent analgesia – strong painkillers – that aren’t otherwise available through the ambulance service. We can provide sedation to either allow somebody to have a surgical procedure or manipulation of a fractured limb, and we can also provide life-saving surgical procedures to control bleeding and administer blood as well.

“The kit that we carry with us allows us to care for patients wherever they may be, without needing to go and get additional resources from hospital. We can provide care in that immediate period after the patient is injured or has fallen ill, to do the same as they would do in the hospital’s emergency department, before they even get there.”

Critical care doctor Louise Webster and trainee specialist paramedic Mark Kinsella using some of the air ambulance’s kit

This specialist knowledge is vital for the outcomes of the seriously ill and injured patients they treat, and as such the teams train during every shift. Mark Kinsella, a trainee specialist paramedic, kneels next to Louise to demonstrate the actions they would take if their patient had no heartbeat. “Cardiac arrests count for around a third of our work, so we’ve become very proficient at it,” Mark explains as he slides a breathing tube down the rubber throat of a mannequin. “It’s unusual for a non-doctor to intubate a patient like this, but we’re geared up for it.

“We also carry lots that the normal ambulance service doesn’t, like an automatic CPR machine” – Louise fixes it onto the mannequin’s chest and it pumps away – “and mechanical ventilators. We’re trying to upgrade to the latest model. For critical patients we want absolutely everything with very little kit, and the only way we can do this through the very kind donations of the charity.”

Great Western Air Ambulance Charity receives no day-to-day funding from Government or the National Lottery, despite the vital service offered by the team. To run the helicopter from Filton for a year costs £3m, based on an average of five call-outs per day – though Jules says he remembers one day they did 11. The charity survives on one-off donations, fundraising events and charity places at big sporting events: keeping it going is a huge undertaking for everyone involved behind the scenes.

The specialist medical kit on board the air ambulance is all purchased using donations

Back on the tarmac, pilot Jim Green sits in the cockpit with the morning sun shining through it. He’s been flying the air ambulance for four years, after a decade of commercial flying. “It seemed like a really cool job,” he says. “I was keen to pursue something different: jobs for a pilot are usually very routine and meticulously planned, but this is all on the hoof. It’s exciting because it’s different every day. You never know what you’ll encounter.”

Career highlights so far include landing the helicopter at Clifton Observatory, on top of Glastonbury Tor and the carpark of Asda in Bedminster, though it’s often not the locations that pose the greatest challenges: “We’ve had people kick footballs at the helicopter when we were taking off, been attacked by sheep and had cows try to lick the helicopter when we came in to land.”

The helicopter he’s flying now, with its huge red kit bag in the back full of emergency equipment, seats that swivel to make way for a stretcher and upgraded engines, came into use in 2017 and was designed for purpose, making it easier for the team to serve the people of this region even better than before. “It’s a similar level of care to the A&E department of a major hospital – just without all the access to resources,” says critical care doctor Jules. “It’s a challenge, but we’re bringing the skills from hospitals to pre-hospital care. It makes a big difference to patient outcome and their chances of survival.” The radio buzzes to life and it’s time to leave the crew to do what they do best: critical, life-saving work that has been going on here for a decade.

To celebrate ten years of the Great Western Air Ambulance Charity, the team are looking to collect the stories of those who have been helped by the air ambulance. To find out more, visit www.greatwesternairambulance.com