48
helipad | www.daat.org
One Year On
Operations Director Nigel Hare takes a look back on an unprecedented year full of challenges for our operational teams
A
s I write the content for this edition of Helipad, it is the first anniversary of the start of the first COVID-19 lockdown. Exactly a year later, we all find ourselves in the current lockdown, but with a much brighter outlook ahead of us. Although certainly not an anniversary to celebrate, the significant additional work that the team at Devon Air Ambulance has undertaken to overcome the challenges throughout the pandemic, as well as the continuing support from you, our supporters, is testament to the commitment we all have to keep our lifesaving service operational. At the end of March, we took the difficult decision to temporarily cease responding using our two helicopters as we could not ensure the safety of our patients and crew due to the confined space inside the helicopters. With pilots not permitted to wear PPE for flight safety reasons, and patients on our aircraft stretcher being less than one metre away from the pilot, we couldn’t adequately protect either. Although it was difficult having to consider suspending our helicopter service, the safety of our patients and staff had to be our first priority. We switched to responding to patients using just our
recently introduced Critical Car Cars to ensure we were still able to respond to patients in their time of need. Being open in communicating our decision, and the reasons why we made it, meant we received offers of help that would otherwise not have been forthcoming. One such offer came from Babcock Marine at Devonport Dockyard and, in discussing with them the challenges we faced in keeping our patients and staff safe in the helicopter, this led to the development of a separation screen, something Babcock usually produced for nuclear submarines. Sadly, we are all too familiar now with separation screens, however, at the start of the pandemic, the idea of designing and fitting one inside a helicopter to provide protection against an airborne virus, was groundbreaking. Our Helicopter Services team were not put off by the challenge and alongside the Civil Aviation Authority and a different division within Babcock, ‘Babcock Mission Critical Services Onshore’ who operate Air Ambulances elsewhere in the UK, our helicopters were examined and measured, prototypes were designed, and within weeks a fully approved separation screen was fitted to both our helicopters and we
