Wiltshire charity needs £5m per year to keep saving lives
Wiltshire and Bath Air Ambulance attended a record number of incidents in 2024
Last updated 20th Mar 2025
A Wiltshire charity has told us it needs to raise over £5million to continue saving lives across the county.
Wiltshire and Bath Air Ambulance says rising costs and greater demand are among the factors contributing to the increased figure.
In 2024, the charity attended a record 1,343 missions.
Charity CEO David Philpott said advances in technology are also adding to their expense bills.
He said: "Not a year goes by when something new doesn't come to market that can help us save lives better.
"Whether it's in the way that we give blood transfusions besides the road, or whether it's about the way in which we administer painkillers to people on the worst day of their life, feeling the most intense and excruciating pain they've ever felt. All of these advances come at a cost."
Mr Philpott added that a "strategic decision" taken by the charity's board of trustees a few years ago is also adding to the cost, but it's also allowing them to save more lives.
"As it became affordable, we wanted to make sure that we had a specialist pre hospital care doctor on every flight," he said.
In 2024, more than half of the missions the charity was called to had doctors on board.
"Doctors don't come cheap," Mr Philpott told us, adding: "We don't directly employ them, we get them furloughed to us or or we contract with hospitals to have them work two days a week, four days a month, whatever it might be and so those salary costs get passed on to us."
It's not just the people and medicine that needs paying for, running a Helicopter isn't cheap either.
"Just last week I signed off a payment of nearly £400,000 for routine repairs, just doing some recalibration work on our rotor mask, taking care of some routine maintenance," he said, adding that the intense regulation of helicopters requires them to be in perfect working order before leaving a helipad.
He also told us having the air ambulance available can be the difference between life and death.
"I got a WhatsApp message from my clinical lead theother day and she said, the mission we just went on, if we had been 5 minutes slower, in other words, if there wasn't an air ambulance and a land ambulance had gone, the patient would have died," he said.
Mr Philpott said costs have naturally increased as the charity is able to deliver an improved service, saying the in quarter of a century he's been involved in the air ambulance sector, the service has progressed from "swoop and scoop" to landing at the roadside and delivering life-saving care, performing amputations and even delivering babies.
He said the public doesn't need to change how it supports the charity, but simply to continue doing so , with fundraising activities, taking part in the charity's society lottery and leaving gifts in wills.