2 minute read
A day in the life of
Dr Richard Fawcett, a specialist in emergency medicine and pre-hospital care who flies life-saving missions with Midlands Air Ambulance
Donat e w hen you book a holid a y
I started flying for Midlands Air Ambulance in 2012, alongside my job as an A&E Consultant at the Royal Stoke University Hospital, one of the UK’s biggest and busiest major trauma hospitals.
I’m also in the Army Reserves and I’ve done three tours of Afghanistan. On the last tour I was in a team flying out to battlefields on a Chinook helicopter to take wounded soldiers to a trauma hospital - that was good training!
A typical day...
...starts at 7am and the shift is 12 hours. The team consists of a pilot, a senior doctor and a critical care paramedic. We check our kit is in good order and we’re stocked with drugs and get a brief from the pilot on the weather. If we don’t need to leave we do some simulations to prep, catch up on paperwork or review cases to see if we can learn anything. A typical shift has one to four jobs taking one to five hours.
We deal with...
Did you know? Midlands Air Ambulance gets no government funding and is solely reliant on donations. Each lifesaving mission costs about £2,500 so every penny counts. midlandsairambulance.com
The hardest thing...
...major incidents like a terrorist attack, fire or building collapse, and individual incidents like knife crime, road traffic accidents and cardiac arrests. We help paramedics with any complex case.
The area we cover is huge and we could be landing on the M6 or a mountain.
… is when no matter how hard you try and how well you work as a team, you just can’t save someone. Having to face the family and tell them that is difficult. But when we do save someone it’s incredibly rewarding. Most of the fundraisers we meet are ex-patients or close to one.
I can honestly say...
...The team makes a real difference, not only to life and death situations but also by reducing suffering and improving recovery and quality of life. We take A&E to the patient, very quickly, to start damage control resuscitation at the earliest possible moment and optimise patient care and survivability. We can deliver more advanced drugs and painkillers, put patients in medically induced comas and perform life saving surgery. It can be the difference between someone walking out of a hospital or going into care.
