15 February 2018

FEBRUARY MEETING


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.