This months
meeting fell on Valentines Day and there was plenty of love in the air for our
guest speaker from the Kent Surrey and Sussex Air Ambulance. Despite the awful weather, we had a great turnout with a buzzing energy to the room. Our guest speaker Myra,
a volunteer for the KSS Ambulance Service was engaging and informative. She
went on to explain the history of the service, which has been around for 26
years, one of the first of its kind in the UK.
Akin to the RNLI,
this amazing service runs independently from government control and relies wholly
on charitable donations. The wonderful men and women bring the A&E to the scene,
ensuring that each patient is stable, delivering trauma triage on scene – allowing
that person to be able to be seen within the “golden hour” at a specialist
hospital, in as little as 20 minutes, to hospitals across the south and up as far
as London’s St Georges Hospital. Not only are they able to deliver a paramedic
and a consultant doctor to the scene, they also carry blood and plasma – they are
also the first air ambulance service to operate at night.
The talk helped
us understand the depth of innovation and scope in which services like the air ambulance
deliver. They truly are “a life-saving charity”. Countless lives have been saved
and will be saved so long as these pilots and doctors are able to keep flying. Each
year the charity must raise over £7.5m to stay in the air and attend to an average
of 2000 incidents. Myra’s talk was truly inspiring and made us all think twice when
we hear the sound of the helicopters in the sky, its not just sound of engines
and rotary blades, it is the sound of a life being saved, a family being put
back together and a future being fulfilled.
For more information
on the Kent Surrey and Sussex Air Ambulance pop on over to their website and
spread the word about these heroes in the sky. www.kssairambulance.org.uk
We also held our
raffle which was love inspired, with some yummy gifts – many thanks to Angela
for putting it together.
