Clinical Work
Our clinicians, often consultants in emergency medicine or anaesthesia, are passionate about developing the most advanced emergency pre-hospital treatment for our patients
East Anglian Air Ambulance thrives on being part of the community it serves, and is committed to providing the highest standard of patient care possible. As part of this commitment, EAAA works hard to bring the best possible treatment, equipment, and skills to their service. This means being at the vanguard of clinical work research. Our clinicians, often consultants in emergency medicine or anaesthesia, are passionate about developing the most advanced emergency pre-hospital treatment for our patients. Research is an important part of this commitment to excellence; and so this page will demonstrate our work.
Body-worn Cameras
East Anglian Air Ambulance (EAAA) has equipped its crew members with body-worn video cameras (BWVC) to further enhance the standards of healthcare it offers. The Charity’s clinical staff are now wearing discreet body cameras when on missions throughout the East of England.
The patient and clinical data gathered during this process will not be shared with anyone external unless patient’s consent has been given. The only exception to this will be where EAAA is obliged to handover the footage to a higher authority. We envisage that these circumstances will be very rare and limited to cases where the police or courts require the information as part of a criminal investigation. Such footage will not be used for promotional reasons or for any purposes other than internal training.
Please note that EAAA sometimes works with external producers who record our missions for documentary television programmes using their own equipment and personnel. In these cases, separate consent arrangements will be used and managed by the production company.
EAAA are continually working to ensure that we deliver the best possible care to our patients. Every incident is different, so it is standard practice for every case we attend to be discussed in detail in order to identify whether anything new can be learned. Any relevant learning points are then shared with all of our operational crews.
The use of body-worn video cameras will allow the attending crew and their supervising consultant to review all aspects of the incident and aid in the development of individual practice. If we think it would be beneficial for all of our clinical colleagues to see the original footage as part of the learning process, we will make all reasonable efforts to seek the explicit consent of the patient(s) involved in the incident to share this.
The body-worn video camera will be attached to the outside of the crew member’s jacket and will be clearly visible.
We fully respect your wishes and the video will be immediately switched off, and any footage recorded prior to this will be immediately erased on return to the airbase.
Your wishes will be fully respected, and you are welcome to contact us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and we will then erase all footage.
The footage will be routinely deleted once viewed by the attending team or after 30 days, whichever is sooner. If a requirement is identified for the footage to be retained beyond 30 days, all efforts will be made to seek consent from the patient(s) involved.
The footage will be stored on a secure, restricted access computer located at the operational airbase. Recordings can only be seen by those authorised to see them, and access is logged and available for audit.
No. We will not use the recording for anything other than the teaching purposes as described above. For example, the footage cannot be used for promotional purposes, news reports, or uploaded onto social media.
RePHILL Trial
We are pleased to announce that as of January 2018 we began participating in a medical trial at our Norwich Base. EAAA will be part of a randomised, controlled trial of pre-hospital blood products.
The Re-PHILL trial is a nationwide study run by Birmingham University Hospital, which aims to determine whether giving blood in a pre-hospital environment improves patient outcomes in a trauma setting. This is a blind trial where participants (our team at EAAA) will not know what product they are receiving; minimising the risk of bias in testing the treatment.
To take part in this trial we at EAAA need to receive daily provisions of blood or saline (salty water). SERV Norfolk have offered to collect these products from the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital and deliver them to us by car or bike every day for three years to ensure that we can take part in this study, that could potentially save more lives.
There is currently no evidence to suggest either way whether giving pre-hospital blood products on scene will actually improve patient outcomes, and we don’t know if giving blood and plasma early in the course of injury aids survival. This trial, which we are performing with several other air ambulance services, including MAGPAS, will determine whether this strategy is effective or not. This is an important trial, which will ensure we are giving our patients the best possible treatment on scene. All of our doctors and critical care paramedics are fully trained to administer both products.
SERV, a charity which is managed, run and operated entirely by volunteers, provides a phenomenal service specialising in transporting blood and blood products, samples, instruments, medical notes and donated breast milk for the benefit of NHS patients. Not only has SERV committed their time to do this, but the charity have been an integral part of the planning, logistical and testing process leading up to the agreement to take part in the trial. Without their commitment to this project it would simply not be possible to undertake, so we would like to say a big thank you to them.
We are pleased to be contributing to the development of pre-hospital medical care in order to provide the best possible outcomes for our patients. We are incredibly grateful to the EAAA team who have worked hard to ensure the smooth running of this project. We will update you on any outcomes from this project in the future.