Service offers vital care

In its four years in existence, Scotland’s Charity Air Ambulance has surpassed all the hopes of the men and women who brought it into existence.

The aircraft they launched into the air was designed to offer vital emergency care to some of the country’s inaccessible rural areas.

Many of those areas are within the Perthshire region in which the organisation’s helicopter is based – at Scone airfield.

The visionaries, among them local businessmen including John Bullough, thought it the single greatest thing they could do to benefit the people of Scotland.

Nonetheless, when it launched on May 22 2013 they knew it would be challenge simply to secure the money to keep the helicopter in the air.

As it celebrates its fourth anniversary, SCAA is an integral part of the emergency network, working in partnership with the Scottish Ambulance service, which operates Scotland’s two other air ambulances.

The charity has flown the equivalent of five times around the world – that’s halfway to the moon.

It has responded to almost 1,200 emergency call-outs, while SCAA’s rapid response vehicle – a bespoke Skoda Octavia 4x4 – has attended at more than 200 others.

A group of local businessmen and women has agreed to fund the shift from 10-hour shifts to 12-hour shifts, enabling the service to attend otherwise “out-of-hours” emergencies.

Its role is also changing as the longer flights and additional space made available by the shift to a new and larger helicopter now enables it to increase the number of hospital transfers it makes.