GWAAC STRATEGY 2024-2028
Great Western Air Ambulance Charity’s Purpose is to be there for people who need us – people who are experiencing a life-changing illness or injury and need the best care as soon as possible. We have specialist clinicians who are experts in lifesaving treatment, and a dedicated team supporting them. But we can only carry out this work because of the generosity of our local communities who we rely on to support us, year after year. For this we are grateful.
Our Values - We are:
OUR PURPOSE
Why do we exist?
Because a life-changing illness or injury could happen to you, anywhere, anytime, and you deserve the best care, as soon as possible.
Why are we the ones to help?
Because we have amazing people with extraordinary skills, all committed to saving lives in our local communities, who can help you when you need us.
Why can we do what we do?
Because, just as GWAAC’s people care for our communities, you care for them - your generosity keeps GWAAC flying, and keeps us saving lives.
HOW WE CARRY OUT OUR PURPOSE
Great Western Air Ambulance Charity is an integral part of the South West’s emergency response but is funded by local people rather than the NHS or Government.
We are not a transport service. Our team of expert clinicians are called to treat people who are experiencing a life-threatening or life-changing incident, whether it be an accident or a medical event. Our crew bring the Emergency Department to the patient, wherever they are, and some elements of an intensive care unit too. GWAAC delivers lifesaving care, that keeps families together for longer.
Our Critical Care Team utilise their skills, equipment and specialist drugs and make decisions about what is best for each patient. This may involve transporting the patient to hospital in the helicopter, but more often a land ambulance is used and the GWAAC crew travel with the patient via road. In most cases, the patient is taken to one of the South West’s major trauma or cardiac centres in Bristol.
Although our crew save many lives, they are most effective when working in partnership with others. GWAAC leads many projects designed to strengthen this ‘chain of survival’ for people needing urgent care, including:
- Teaching the importance of immediate CPR and defibrillation in cardiac arrests, giving people the skills and confidence to step in
- Identifying priority locations for defibrillators and working with communities to put these in place
- Working with land ambulance crews to enhance their skills and help them identify when to call GWAAC and how to help whilst waiting for our crew and when working together
- Sharing knowledge with other organisations, such as Search and Rescue, the ambulance service’s Hazardous Area Response Team, and Fire and Rescue
HOW WE WILL ACHIEVE OUR PURPOSE
Over the next five years, we will work towards achieving our purpose by pursuing our Ambitions. Under each one there are several steps we will need to take to meet it.
Many of our plans are dependent on funding, or they might rely on another organisation to help us, or another project to be completed first. As a relatively small organisation, we also want to be agile, responsive and able to make the most of opportunities we might not have predicted.
So, things might change a bit. But these are the Values and Ambitions that will guide all our work.
SIX AMBITIONS will guide our work between 2024 and 2028
Deliver clinical and operational excellence
This is the core of what we do, but we know we can do even better. We plan to invest in the development of our clinicians and the people they work with to provide the best care for patients. We want to make sure we are dispatched to the patients who can benefit most from our expertise, get more involved in research and become more evidence and data driven, so we know what we do really makes an impact. We want to be there for anyone who needs us, and make sure that everyone can benefit equitably from our expertise.
Our team is the best it can be
Our people are our greatest resource – we rely on them to deliver our service, raise the funds we need and run the charity, and we need to support them to do this. We want to improve the wellbeing support available to our team, formalise development pathways so people can enhance their skills and help our doctors to balance working with GWAAC with their other commitments. We also want to review our recruitment processes and develop our culture so we can attract and retain the best people, be genuinely inclusive and remove the barriers between our clinical and non-clinical teams.
Be socially and environmentally responsible
Be the charity local people choose to support
Put simply, we need more money so we can be there for anyone experiencing a life-changing or life-threatening event, to train more people in CPR, to provide more defibrillators, to support former patients and bereaved families and to continue providing the best available clinical care. We need people to know who we are and why we need their support, to raise more funds through legacies, regular gifts and our lottery, and to benefit from time given by more volunteers. We will replace our database with a modern system to help us manage our external relationships, increase our visibility, review our fundraising activities, generate more money from commercial activities and make sure we are providing real value to local communities.
Be an excellent organisation
Our supporters trust us with their donations, and we need to make sure we continue to use them effectively and efficiently to provide our service and generate additional funds. We want to increase our focus on using evidence and evaluation to inform and improve our work, continue to professionalise our supporting systems and use new technology where appropriate. We also want to collaborate more with other air ambulances and relevant organisations, so we can use our resources jointly to have a bigger impact. We plan to recruit new Trustees to our Board, bringing in different experiences and skills to improve our governance.
Build a mission support centre
Underpinning our Ambitions is the creation of a Mission Support Centre at our airbase. This will be crucial in helping us to improve our people’s wellbeing, join our clinical and non-clinical teams together, enhance our support for former patients and bereaved families, deliver CPR and clinical training to the public and other stakeholders and provide a hub for our ever-increasing fundraising and engagement activities.
What we won't do by 2028
Our resources are limited, particularly our funding, and therefore there are some things that we don’t plan to do by 2028. That doesn’t mean we won’t be thinking about them, being alert to opportunities and open to suggestions and offers. We don’t plan to:
- Buy our own helicopter or add a second one to our fleet
- Replace our helicopter with a larger or more modern model
- Become a registered air operator with the Civil Aviation Authority and run our own helicopter operation
- Become clinically independent from the ambulance service, with our own Care Quality Commission registration
Common themes
To achieve our Ambitions, there are some things we will need to be excellent at:
- Being guided by our Values and putting them into practice in everything we do
- Being led by evidence, from other organisations and generated internally, on what is and isn’t likely to work
- Monitoring and evaluating everything we do, so we can assess its value and effectiveness, and do better in the future
- Communicating well, with honesty and transparency, internally and externally
- Collaborating with each other, spending time with people from different teams, discussing our plans and activities, introducing new perspectives and creating opportunities for creative discussion and supportive scrutiny
- Being welcoming – of different opinions, of new people from a variety of backgrounds, and of challenges to what we do and how
Find out more about how the charity is run
