High Sheriff of West Sussex looks at the work of the air ambulance and finds out about a cyclist whose life was saved

In acute medical and trauma emergencies, medical research is increasingly identifying the speed with which effective medical treatment can be started as being the critical factor to ensure a successful outcome. This is as true for a heart attack at home, as it is for a major accidental injury on the road.

Despite receiving one 999 call a minute, SECAmb, our superb NHS ambulance service, is able to manage the great majority of these emergencies, but the roads in West Sussex are busy and some areas are very difficult to reach. And when a rapid response might make the difference between life and death, medical support has to come to the scene using a very different route - by air.

The helicopter emergency medical service run by Air Ambulance Kent Surrey Sussex (AAKSS) has bases in Redhill and Rochester, and over the 30 years it has been in operation, the team has attended 30,000 incidents.

In the past year, AAKSS has been called out more than 300 times to West Sussex, with 32 calls in the past month, ranging from road traffic collisions, medical emergency and accidental injury.

One such patient is Jim from Horsham, who had gone out cycling and failed to return home.

His wife, Amy, picks up the story: “It began to get late and I started to worry that Jim wasn’t home yet. I called him several times but he didn’t answer. I knew something was wrong.

“My fears were confirmed when two police officers knocked on the door, telling me that Jim had been involved in a life-threatening accident and had been airlifted to King’s College Hospital in London.

“Jim has no memory of how the accident happened but he sustained a number of injuries, breaking his spine, face, breastbone and ribs. He also lost some teeth and suffered a dangerous bleed to his brain.

“Because of the severity of Jim’s situation, the air ambulance crew were called. The doctor and paramedic anaesthetised him there at the roadside, taking control of his airway, which was at risk of becoming blocked by blood. The anaesthetic was also crucial in preventing additional swelling in his brain caused by the bleed.

“Jim was in an induced coma for two weeks while in intensive care. Thankfully, he made an amazing recovery and is now back home, with our two young children, where he belongs.

“Without the fast response from the air ambulance, I don’t know what kind of brain injury Jim could have been left with – or whether he would still be with us at all.”

Jim’s survival will have depended on many factors but key will have been AAKSS’s unique combination of highly-skilled clinicians, state-of-the-art medical equipment and an expertly-piloted helicopter, which ensured the management of Jim’s injuries could begin as quickly as possible.

Every air ambulance mission is coordinated with NHS emergency services, but AAKSS is not itself an NHS organisation. Instead, it is an independent charity with almost 90 per cent of its £14million annual running costs being met by donations from the public.

The pandemic has meant that this life-saving organisation is now in need of some life-saving help itself. Since its Coronavirus Emergency Appeal was set up 10 weeks ago, an amazing £1million has been raised, for which the charity is deeply grateful. However, this is a third of the shortfall it is facing and opportunities to give additional support are on their website.

As Amy says: “It’s thanks to all those people who support the air ambulance that it was there for us when our family needed it. I am just so grateful.”

For more information, visit www.aakss.org.uk

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