Air ambulance charity Essex & Herts Air Ambulance (EHAAT) saw its busiest year ever in 2018, treating 1,491 patients.
Latest figures have seen a two per cent increase on 2017 and a rise of 38 per cent on 2016 where they treated 1,077 patients.
EHAAT’s helicopters and Rapid Response Vehicles (RRV) were dispatched on a total of 2,241 occasions last year. Of these 1,852 (83 per cent) were for incidents in Essex and Hertfordshire.
Medical incidents accounted for 39 per cent of the total, followed by road traffic collisions (24 per cent) and accidental injuries (15 per cent). The remaining 22% included a mix of cases such as assaults and sports/leisure accidents.
The busiest part of the year came in May, June and July, with more than 200 missions each month. During 2018 over 300 missions took place on a Saturday, making it the busiest day of the week.
Stuart Elms, clinical director at EHAAT, commented: “The need for the charity’s life-saving service is as strong now as it was twenty years ago when our first helicopter, covering just Essex, took to the air with two Paramedics in 1998.”
We now operate Critical Care Teams consisting of a pre-hospital care doctor and critical care paramedic and have two state-of-the-art helicopters covering the counties of Essex and Hertfordshire. They are backed up by RRV after sunset and in poor weather.”
“With the help of our supporters across Essex and Hertfordshire we will continue to develop our service to give the best critical care we can to the critically ill and seriously injured patients that we attend.”
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