President Derek Williams recently welcomed District Governor Clayton Heycock to this year's charter dinner of the Rotary Club of Narberth and Whitland when the guest speaker was Steve Jones, regional development manager for Wales Air Ambulance.
Steve gave a brief history of the service and illustrated his talk with an excellent slide show.
The service, which has three helicopters in Wales, has now been in operation for four years and has just completed 4,000 missions saving countless lives in the process. Each helicopter carries a pilot, two specially trained ambulance paramedics and all the equipment found on a road ambulance.
In some parts of Wales, it can take a road ambulance up to an hour to reach an emergency call, while an air ambulance can reach even the remotest parts of Wales in little over 20 minutes and the average response time of a helicopter is 10 minutes. Aircrew paramedics are normally administering treatment within 15 minutes of the receipt of a call.
The cost of funding the service is at present in excess of £2 million per year and, unbelievably, there is no funding available to the charity from the Government or national lottery. All the monies for the service have to be generated through donations from the public.
Anyone who would like to make a donation, undertake an event on behalf of WAA, join the lottery, simply donate unwanted items or volunteer to join the team, call 08700 720999 for the South Wales branch of the service.