Two new Critical Care Cars have joined the Devon Air Ambulance team to help provide life saving care when emergency aircrafts are unable to fly due to poor weather or maintenance.
Devon Air Ambulance were successful in gaining £226k of funding following the Autumn 2018 Budget, which announced £10 million in capital funding for air ambulance services. The funding provided two critical care cars, all their medical equipment and 35 public access defibrillators.
Nigel Hare, Operations Director, said:
The two fully-equipped Volvo XC90 Critical Care Cars (CCC) have now arrived and will shortly be going into service. These CCCs provide resilience and capability across our geographically large county when one of our aircraft is unable to fly. This development ensures our highly skilled critical care paramedics and doctors, and their advanced life-saving equipment, mirroring the medical equipment on board our aircraft, can still be delivered to scene, improving the clinical outcomes for patients.
The CCCs are very safe, fast, and equipped with all that’s needed for our teams to deliver life-saving treatment to a patient. They are fitted with blue lights and warning sirens and our teams have also undergone extensive enhanced emergency response ‘blue light’ driver training.
Darren Goodwin, Operations Manager said:
We would like to thank Volvo UK for their help and support with this project and of course the Department of Health for the grant given which allowed us to buy these lifesaving vehicles.
Devon Air Ambulance delivers lifesaving enhanced and critical care to patients wherever their injury or illness has occurred, whether at home, work or out and about within Devon. The clinical teams treat the most critically ill and injured patients and then assist in conveying them to specialist treatment centres, with the aim to improve outcomes and reduce deaths.
Image credit: Devon Air Ambulance
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