COLUMN: Air Ambulance charity hits major milestones

So far it's been a very busy year for your local air ambulance. As well as our usual average of six missions a day across our services, we've also had a bumper year for fundraising and for developments in our charity.'¨Here are some of our biggest moments so far this year. In April we launched our brand new night car service, extending our hours of operation from 7pm to 2am every day of the year. Our night cars make use of the great road networks surrounding our counties, allowing us to bring our critical care teams to more patients than ever before. Now we can save lives both night and day.

Our second ever National Air Ambulance Week raised an astonishing £30,460 this September. More than 200 volunteers from all five of our counties came together to paint their towns and cities yellow again. This is an amazing achievement – thank you to everyone who took part and helped us make this Air Ambulance Week our best yet.

And this October our head office staff finally outgrew our tiny office space in the heart of Princethorpe and moved to a bigger building in Rugby to better accommodate everyone who helps to keep our helicopters save lives. Our new address is Clifton House, Butlers Leap, Rugby. We also changed our phone number from the old premium number to 0300 3045999 so supporters can contact us without having to pay fees.

Finally, we hit our 25,000th mission. We hit this amazing target just 13 years after our first air ambulance took to the skies.

Thank you for the support this year, without our local communities and supporters, we wouldn’t have been able to achieve these milestones.