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helipad | www.daat.org
A New
resilience...
Our new Critical Care Cars added a level of fle ibility to our service – ust when we needed it most!
Y
ou may remember in Spring Helipad we welcomed our two new Critical Care Cars to Devon Air Ambulance. They came into service in February and were introduced to build in resilience to our service and support the enhanced critical care we can deliver across the county. Our cars offer a safe and speedy way to respond to patients if our helicopters are o ine due to poor weather or when they were away for maintenance or servicing. As the true impact of Coronavirus became clear, and we too the very di cult decision to temporarily stop ying while we put in place measures to protect our patients and crew from the virus, our two cars became absolutely vital to our service. Having them available meant we could still deliver our clinical teams to our patients when they urgently needed the enhanced level of critical care that we provide. As more people will have seen our Critical Care Cars out on the road since that time, we thought it would be good to take a more in-depth look at them and the vital role they played during these unprecedented times.
Our Critical Care Cars There are several different makes of cars which can be adapted – also known as ‘blue light’ conversion – specifically for the emergency services. At the start of the process, in order to select the right car we spent some time looking at the different models available, learning from the experience of other services that use critical care cars and considering these against our local needs. This led us to choose the Volvo XC90 as the best cars for our service in Devon. Our Volvo XC90’s have a high-performance powerful hybrid engine which offers good handling at speeds over rough road surfaces and, because they are 4-wheel drive, they can take us safely off-road and into the Devon countryside when needed. This car also has lots of space, both in terms of roomy seating for up to three clinicians on duty (two paramedics or two paramedics and a doctor) in addition to a very large boot
for all their kit and medical equipment. The generous storage space also means we have some spare capacity as new equipment or kit might be required. This is particularly useful at the moment as the crew need to carry supplies of both Level 2 and Level 3 PPE to wear when assisting patients. As part of the development of our cars, our paramedics have also undertaken Level 3 Ambulance Response training, also known as ‘blue light’ training, to provide them with the skills to drive the cars safely, at speed, to reach our patients in their time of need.
