Emily Graves spoke with new children's charity ArriveAliveAppeal

Tony Bateson (right) with Richard Harpin founder of Homeserve

Only five out of 15 children's hospitals have helipads and children's lives are lost because of this shortage. Six thousand children a year are admitted to children's hospitals from distant destinations, but only 2% are taken by air. It doesn't matter how big an emergency is, or how critically ill the child is, they get put into a road ambulance and nearly 2,000 of those journeys are two hours or more.

The quickest and safest way to move critically sick children over long distances is by helicopter. New charity ArriveAliveAppeal will campaign and fundraise for a helipad at every Children's' Hospital in England and Wales until this task has been accomplished. To find out more Emily Graves spoke with Tony Bateson, the Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph featured Social Entrepreneur and founder adviser to the ArriveAlive team.

Emily: What is Arrive/Alive?

Tony: When I retired from the County Air Ambulance Trust 18 months or so ago and in the last year or two running up to my retirement, I was alarmed to find through attending many medical conferences that the children's hospital sector seemed to have no benefit at all from the very successful Air Ambulance programme that's developed in the UK.

When I was involved in setting up the County Air Ambulance Trust in 1993 there were only three helicopters in the UK and there are now 36 helicopters; but they seem to have somehow skirted around the children's hospitals. The reason for that is quite straightforward; it's nobody's fault, it's just a functional gap that's developed. It's because air ambulances operate on around about a 50-mile radius give or take, but the children's hospitals are over 100 miles apart. The majority of children in the country who are going to be admitted to children's hospitals have to travel some distance to get to the particular hospital they're going to. A massive number of people live at awkward distances from children's hospitals. One would hope that the Air Ambulance movement could have accommodated this somehow, but it has not happened. The net result of that is that we have 6,000 children every year admitted to children's hospitals from distant destinations and only 2% are actually taken by air. It doesn't matter how big an emergency is, or how critically ill the child is, they get put into a road ambulance and sent on their way.

If I give as an example Cornwall and the South West of England; that's 150 miles away from either of the nearest children's hospitals in Bristol and Southampton. Southampton has got a new helipad and therefore could receive helicopter transfers, but they don't have them. What happens is that the child goes in a road ambulance for a three and a half hour journey to Bristol and sadly children's lives are lost because 1,000 of the total of 6,000 are really critically ill vulnerable cases and the head of emergency medicine in the National Health Service is on record as having said that ambulance journeys over 45 minutes are life-threatening. You've got 1,000 critically ill kids who make these long ambulance journeys and 2,000 in total out of the 6,000 who make journeys of two hours or longer duration, so we're not really doing our best for our children.

The medicine and medical skills available at children's hospitals are phenomenal. The Prime Minister has spoken in the House of Commons saying how our children's hospital medicine is leading the world. The only problem is you have to get your child there and because of the way the NHS is set up these days, every large hospital or group of hospitals is a trust or a foundation trust and they don't seem to work together on infrastructure things. The doctors talk to each other and have regular conferences on clinical matters, but there just doesn't seem to be a focus on getting these kids transferred as quickly as possible to the special hospital they need.

Emily: How many hospitals in the UK have a helipad?

Tony: About 40. There are over 200 A&E hospitals south of the border. I'm not including Scotland. Scotland enjoys a very good Air Service because it's paid for by the Scottish government and of course they have problems with distance and the off shore islands and all of those sort of things, but they have both fixed wing and helicopter aircraft to shift emergency patients around. South of the border we've got 225 or thereabouts A&E hospitals and about 40 helipads. I'm afraid we're miles behind the rest of the developed world.

Emily: So are you hoping that more helipads will be built?

Tony: Yes. I led the development to the programme with the County Ambulance Trust called the HELP Appeal and it stands for Helicopter Emergency Landing Pads. I had been involved before I retired with about seven or eight helipads that either have been completed or are in the process of being built, so I'm hopeful. I developed a programme of about 25 hospitals, priority lists if you like, which hopefully would be developed within 10 years; but I've retired from the County Ambulance Trust and that project is being run by my successor and I felt in attending the - it's an amusing name it's called PICNIC - the group of emergency doctors who meet regularly; but it stands for Paediatric Intensive Care and Neo-Natal Intensive Care: in other words young people and babies. I was just so dismayed that the Air Ambulance movement hadn't reached out to this group of hospitals. They said to me is there anything you could do; you've worked for a long time in the air ambulance sector. I said that I would help them to get a priority act set up and that's how Arrive/Alive came about. Its purpose is to put in a really sharp focus on the special need of not only helipads, but probably a small dedicated group of air ambulances too. You probably need, with 6,000 transfers a year; maybe a proportion of those, perhaps a fifth of those, wouldn't need air transport, but a lot of them would. That would keep four or five air ambulances pretty busy, so it's both helipads and helicopters.

Emily: How much does it cost for a helipad to be built?

Tony: It depends; they cost around a million pounds for an all singing and dancing helipad. That's one that doesn't interfere with car parking because it's an elevated helipad. They can come in cast aluminium beam construction, so they can be assembled on site by a team of riggers. They come on the back of a low-loader and they stand about two or three metres above the ground. If you look at the Arrive/Alive website, on the home page you can see the helipad that I led the development of at Southampton University Hospital. There are cars parked underneath it, so it doesn't interfere too much with car parking and it's only about a hundred feet from the direct admissions area into the A&E department. One that I built at Oswestry hospital, which is a spinal injuries centre, cost about four hundred and fifty thousand. It's a superb helipad. It's a surface helipad and there's an undercover walkway straight into the hospital. One young man, his ability was saved at that hospital within a couple of weeks of the helipad opening. When he arrived at the hospital they were able to save his spinal cord and I heard from him just a few weeks later that he was up and walking. Ordinarily had he arrived on the rather lumpy sports field that had been used for helicopter transfers before he might well have been paraplegic or quadriplegic for the rest of his life.

Emily: So there are lots of success stories?

Tony: Absolutely. Wonderful success stories. There have been plenty of others. Southampton opened just over a year ago; it was budgeted to have seven, (one arrival a day) and in fact last time I heard they were getting almost 11 arrivals a week. It's saving a lot more lives and helping a lot more people.

Emily: So what are the next steps for the ArriveAlive team?

Tony: We're starting our direct fundraising drive. We have been contacting the corporate sector to develop fundraising in the Midlands. Then we will gradually roll that out to the whole of the country. There are 15 children's hospitals up and down the UK. They don't all necessarily do some of the specialisations that are needed. If you are talking about complex cardiac surgery for example, probably only about half of the 15 children's hospitals perform that sort of surgery. It means a child hasn't got to go to a children's hospital, but a child has to go to one of only one in two of the children's hospitals, so it can be 150 miles.

Emily: How can people find out more information about the Arrive/Alive Team?

Tony: Anybody who goes to www.arrivealiveappeal.org they will see everything there and it's got links to other sites because we've got an associated recycling campaign where people who are helping the ArriveAliveAppeal can be involved in recycling aluminium and join in what's called ArriveAliveCrew. That's www.arrivealivecrew.com so they could look up that website.