The air ambulance service covering Maldon is now helping with the transfer of some Covid-19 patients between pressured local hospitals.

The Essex & Herts Air Ambulance (EHAAT) team members travel by helicopter or Rapid Response Vehicle (RRV) to local hospitals and accompany patients in a designated land ambulance to the receiving hospital.

Air ambulance staff are able to provide the advanced level of care that allows a safe transfer of critically ill Covid-19 patients. At the current time this is happening once or twice a day.

When not dealing with transfers the team continues providing its normal response to emergencies such as cardiac arrests, road accidents and other serious injuries. A team based at North Weald is dealing with the Covid transfers and a team at Earls Colne with the more usual run of urgent call-outs.

Redistributing the current huge demand on local hospitals

Stuart Elms, Clinical Director at EHAAT said: "As soon as we identified there was a need, we put plans in place in early January to help with these transfers with the same outstanding level of care and clinical governance that we apply to our usual caseload.

"The first request came in within a few days, and we were happy to help. This is not affecting our ability to respond to emergencies in the normal way, but we will continue to review this.

"The system is currently incredibly busy, and we are helping to move Covid-19 patients from hospitals in our region which are facing challenges due to the unprecedented number of patients they are seeing, to those with capacity. The aim is to help level the load and redistribute this huge demand.

"We are doing everything we can to keep our patients, staff, volunteers and supporters safe at the moment and East of England Ambulance Service are helping us by vaccinating all our frontline staff."

2020 was the service's busiest ever year

Last year was the charity's busiest ever year, despite a brief fall in the number of incidents its teams were sent to during the first lockdown.

Between January and December EHAAT's crews attended 1,626 patients, up 6 per cent on the 2019 figure of 1,526.

One reason for the increase was that 2020 was the first full year of 24/7 operations, which began in October 2019. A total of 480 patients were attended at night, who would have previously been in need outside of the service's hours.

2020 was also the first full year in which the charity's helicopters and emergency response vehicles carried blood supplies on board, enabling potentially life-saving blood transfusions to be given on-scene before patients reach hospital. A total of 72 patients received blood transfusions at the scene or in the air last year.

For more information about the work of the charity and how you can support it, visit the EHAAT website via the link here.