Children’s Air Ambulance welcomes KIDS/NTS on board

The Children’s Air Ambulance (TCAA) has welcomed Birmingham Children’s Hospital’s KIDS/NTS emergency transport service on board as the latest team from across the UK to utilise the charity’s aircraft to transfer critically ill babies and children.

The Children’s Air Ambulance is a national service which supports paediatric and neonatal care through the high-speed, potentially lifesaving transfer of critically ill babies and children.

The clinically designed helicopters provide a flying intensive care unit for young patients and enables teams to bring specialist equipment on board to transfer patients from one hospital to another. If a child is too sick to fly then the Children’s Air Ambulance can fly a specialist team directly to them.

KIDS/NTS, which is TCAA’s 11th NHS retrieval and transport team partner, is a combined neonatal and paediatric critical care advice and transport service that offers expert clinical advice and transport for all ages from extreme prematurity up to 16yrs.

The service has previously used specialist land ambulances for transfer and will now also be able to use TCAA’s two aircraft to provide emergency specialist transport for critically ill babies and children across the region.

The KIDS/NTS service, based at Birmingham Children’s Hospital, has transferred more than 2,000 newborn, small babies, and children requiring intensive care and emergency treatment ensuring their young patients are able to access the right place, at the right time for the right treatment.

Commenting on the milestone, TCAA Operations Manager Alfie Daly said:

“We’re delighted to welcome KIDS/NTS into our family of clinical partner teams and look forward to working with them to deliver their patients or care to wherever it is needed.

“The collaborative working between TCAA and KIDS/NTS allows patients to receive specialist care approximately four times faster, thus enabling children to receive the care they need in much more timely fashion.”

Mark Russell, KIDS/NTS retrieval consultant, said: “The KIDS NTS team look forward to working with TCAA on some of our longer distance patient journeys, where helicopter transport may significantly reduce patient transfer times.”

The Children’s Air Ambulance, which has carried out over 650 potentially lifesaving missions, receives no funding from government or National Lottery for its missions and relies entirely on voluntary donations to raise the £3,500 needed for every mission.