Dr Tony Bleetman
Confessions of an Air Ambulance Doctor
(Ebury Press, 2012)
I was given a paperback of this book as a Christmas present, which was good as it was one I wanted to read. And who wouldn’t when the blurb on the back cover says:

Drug addicts, lorry crashes, open heart surgery, stab wounds, headless chickens, mating llamas and strip routines — it’s all in a day’s work for emergency doctor Tony Bleetman and his team …
Confessions of an Air Ambulance Doctor is a dramatic behind-the-scenes account of life onboard an air ambulance. Whether they are landing in the middle of the M1 or at a maximum security jail, Tony and his crew Helimed 999 are first on the scene in the most critical of emergencies.
This gripping read will make you laugh, cry and marvel at the wonders of life (and death) in equal measure.

The book certainly lives up to its billing.
Bleetman starts off with stories of the initial days for setting up the first UK Helimed service outside London — that’s no ordinary Air Ambulance but one which carries a trauma doctor plus paramedic rather than two paramedics. Experience has shown that having a trauma doctor on-board does save lives, because they are able to do so much more to help really seriously ill patients than even paramedics can.
And that is hardly surprising when one reads of some of the major surgical interventions that were done on-site by the side of roads and in fields — and yes that does include things like open heart surgery! Which is really scary when one considers that one would not normally want to have this done even in the controlled environment of a hospital operating theatre with three or more surgeons and a full theatre team present. Whereas here this is all done by one trauma surgeon and a paramedic (albeit a super-trained one) in the field with no sterile environment.
Yes I was surprised, amazed and really impressed by some of the things they were doing out in the wild. But when Bleetman tells you about saving severely injured casualties, who would not otherwise have survived to be put in a land ambulance, let alone got to hospital, you have to be impressed and immensely grateful …
… And even more immensely grateful because all of this (with the exception of the paramedics who are paid by the local Ambulance Service) is funded by charity and by doctors giving up their free time for no reward except the satisfaction of helping people. Yes, that’s right, none of this, except the paramedics and, I assume, the drugs, is funded by the NHS! The helicopter, its fuel, the buildings required — ie. all the running costs and capital spend — is all down to big companies and people like us being generous. Which when you consider they would often fly up to six jobs a shift with fuel at £1000 a flying-hour; a helicopter costing millions; and that this is replicated across around two dozen services in the UK means a lot of cash has to be found.
But what about the book? As you might expect it is full of tales of derring-do — real Biggles flying ace stories with a lot of serious (and often bloody) medical stuff added on top. Medical teams are put in positions we have no right to expect them to go (upside down in filthy ditches full of petrol), and they’re almost constantly hampered by officious firemen, police and on-lookers whose objective is to get people out and get things moving and unable to see that doing so will kill the casualty. No wonder these people regularly get called “Muppets” (and that’s the polite version) to their faces.
If you can stomach the medical bit then this is a light but engaging read which I found it hard to put down.
Overall Rating: ★★★★☆