London's Air Ambulance

LONDON'S AIR AMBULANCE is based at The Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel. It is the Helicopter Emergency Medical Service for London and the M25 area, providing pre-hospital trauma care to over 17.5% of the UK population.

Since our launch in 1989 we have flown over 16,000 missions. We fly 365 days a year and are the only air ambulance in the UK that always caries a senior doctor and a paramedic trained specifically to treat patients who have suffered major injury as the result of an accident. We only ever fly with two experienced pilots on board to ensure a high standard of safety.

We receive some funding from the NHS, and Virgin sponsor half of the helicopter lease. Despite their generosity, inflation and increased demand for our service means that an additional £500,000 per annum is needed to keep the helicopter flying during daylight hours and to enable the service to cary on it's work out of hours in rapid response cars.



Unfortunately accidents don't only happen to someone else and there are a number of patients each year who would have either died or suffered severe disability without the benefit of our service. We take the hospital to the patient and a doctor can carry out many life saving procedures that a paramedic is not trained to do.

Speed is everything and the sooner a doctor can be at a patients side the better chance of survival they have.

Our helicopter and medical team are airborne within 2 minutes of receiving an emergency call.
The team can be anywhere within the M25 in 12 minutes or less.