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London's Air Ambulance wants to provide a 24 hour service for victims of 'major trauma' and needs more funding to do so. We provide rapid and specialist care to victims of 'major trauma'; people suffering severe or life threatening injury to the brain or spine, penetrating injuries, fractures, or burns. This condition is caused mostly by road traffic accidents. Although there is a Helicopter which operates during daylight hours and rapid response cars which take over at night, the cars stop at midnight during the week. This means that if there is an accident or major incident after midnight there is no service operating which delivers doctors to the accident scene thus unnecessarily endangering people's lives. With this money London's Air Ambulance could provide round the clock care to the whole of London
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Situation
As one would expect there are numerous accidents between the hours of 12am-8am during the week. Unfortunately these are the times when London's Air Ambulance could not be of assistance as we do not have the funding to run our rapid response cars. Without rapid specialist medical attention there is a high mortality rate amongst victims of major trauma. If London's Air Ambulance were able to provide the medical care we are famed for there would be a much higher chance of life for the sufferers. The London’s Air Ambulance team has been involved in the majority of major incidents in the past few years – the train crashes at Cannon Street, Southall and Paddington; the Soho bomb; motorway pile-ups and of course the July 2005 terrorist attacks on London’s transport system – and in many less newsworthy although equally important events. On these occasions the medical teams and equipment play a vital role in saving lives. On 7th July the helicopter flew 26 missions back and forth from the various sites and the response cars worked tirelessly. There is a concern that a future major incident could take place whilst we are offline and again many patients would suffer due to our absence. We need increased funding to allow us to provide a crucial 24 hour service to London.