Air ambulance tribute to John getting nearer

Air ambulance tribute to John getting nearer

23 March 2016

A NEW air ambulance service in tribute to Portaferry doctor John Hinds is one step closer to lift-off.

After the Chancellor, George Osborne, announced he was providing £4.5m for the new service in Northern Ireland, the Stormont Health Minister, Simon Hamilton has outlined how the new service will be managed and funded.

Mr Hamilton made his announcement on a visit to Craigavon Hospital on Monday accompanied by the late medic’s partner, Dr Janet Acheson, and First Minister Arlene Foster.

Dr Hinds, who had lobbied Stormont for an airborne emergency service, died in a motorcycle crash while providing volunteer medical cover at the Skerries 100 race in Dublin last July. He had been dubbed motorcycle racing’s “flying doctor” for his voluntary work on the Irish road racing circuit, credited with saving many lives by being quickly on the scene of accidents on his own bike.

Following the 35 year-old’s death, a petition for an air ambulance signed by over 81,000 people was presented to the Health Minister.

On Monday Mr Hamilton said that the new Helicopter Emergency Medical Service (HEMS) will be based at Belfast International Airport at Aldergrove, where it will be within a 25 minute flight time of any part of Northern Ireland.

It was also announced that the aircraft will have the call sign ‘Delta 7’, which was the one used by Dr Hinds.

The Northern Ireland Ambulance Service will take the lead in deploying the ambulance to incidents.

Mr Hamilton said: “John Hinds and I shared the same vision of a world class pre-hospital emergency service and it is fitting that today we are here in his hospital base on what would have been his birthday, with his partner, Dr Janet Acheson, his family and many of his work colleagues announcing that we are making his dream a reality.

“We will now develop a service specification for a daylight hours Helicopter Emergency Medical Service, which is physician led but also supported by paramedics. It will provide a primary response role initially for major trauma incidents and develop into a secondary response role helping, for example, heart attack and stroke patients, at an appropriate time in the future.”

“I am pleased to confirm recurrent funding of £250,000 for the Major Trauma Network and a further £250,000 from my Transformation Fund in 2016/17 to facilitate the necessary planning, preparation, recruitment and training to get us to a state of readiness for the HEMS to be put into operation. The Trauma Network board have also met and begun preparatory work including recruitment of trauma clinical leads that should be in position by August 2016.”

Dr Acheson, who took on the campaign for an air ambulance in the wake of her partner’s death, said the news came on a day of “mixed emotions” for the Hinds and Acheson families.

“Today as a family we should have been celebrating John’s 36th birthday,” she said.

“Last year, for his birthday John’s mum Josephine gave him a model London HEMS helicopter because he had a dream of a world-leading, trauma network with a doctor-led HEMS at its core. That is now a huge step closer to reality.

“This is the start — this is where the work begins. Hopefully it will not take too long to literally ‘lift off’, but it is better to get it right than rush into a second class service. It takes time to build the right team and the right structure. John believed in high performance.”