
Thames Valley Air Ambulance passes 20,000 emergency calls
"We receive no government or NHS funding. So, every single mission we attend is powered by you, the community," he said."It's thanks to you we've been able to load our kit bags and start our engines an amazing 20,000 times since 2018, bringing critical care directly to the patient."The figure of 20,000 call outs included its critical care paramedic and doctor crews treating nearly 1,500 children since 2018.Based at RAF Benson, the TVAA helicopter can reach anywhere in Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, or Oxfordshire within 15 minutes.The move to an independent healthcare provider in 2018 allowed it to expand its coverage and opened the service to regulation by the Care Quality Commission.In 2022 TVAA became the sixth air ambulance service to gain an Air Operator Certificate, giving it direct responsibility for its aircraft, legal requirements, safety and scheduling.
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'The UK National Screening Committee is looking at this as a priority – including reviewing the evidence for screening men with a family history of prostate cancer. 'While the review is taking place we are getting on with improving cancer treatment and prevention, as well as funding tens of millions of pounds of research – GPs should consider risk factors and use clinical judgment when considering if patients need a prostate cancer test.' Prostate cancer is a lot more than a nuisance By Jonathan Waxman Sixty years ago, around 10,000 people in the UK were diagnosed annually with prostate cancer. Currently over 50,000 men are diagnosed each year and prostate cancer has the dreadful distinction of being the commonest cancer in men. In parallel, the number of prostate cancer deaths has increased from 3,300 to over 12,000 men annually. So, what to do? We can hope that the treatment of prostate cancer will improve and improve, and cures are found. Treatment is getting better. Thankfully, in 2025, well over 80 per cent of men with prostate cancer that has not spread beyond the prostate will be cured and the duration of survival for men with cancer that has spread has doubled compared with 25 years ago. These improvements have come because of modern medicine's marvellous miracles, developing from brilliant university research and big pharma's R & D. Prostate Cancer UK has invested over £120m in research over the years. But clearly despite the gloss of shiny medical breakthroughs, prostate cancer remains a fundamentally unpleasant problem, and a lot more than a nuisance. What can be done? Find it early, you say? Yes, that would seem logical. How do we do this? Well, if we want to find prostate cancer early then the obvious answer is to screen for prostate cancer. There is no UK screening programme for the early detection of prostate cancer, a cancer which is often without symptoms. The National Screening Committee is currently considering the role of screening for prostate cancer. Prostate Cancer UK has led a consortium of men's health charities to collectively inform the committee, which advises government, on the importance of targeted screening for those at highest risk. There are interesting parallels between the prostate cancer and breast cancer screening stories. In the 1970s, before breast cancer screening was introduced by Government dictat, the medical consensus was, and, you have guessed it, that early diagnosis through screening mammography would not save lives. Mrs T, regardless of the medical consensus, waved her handbag at the doctors, ignored the consensus, and launched a screening programme for breast cancer. And the result? Screening mammography together with treatment advances have led to a massive improvement in survival from breast cancer. Before screening, just 65 per cent of patients with breast cancer survived and now over 80 per cent are cured as a result of early detection and better treatment. And how does this improvement manifest in the real world? Around 3000 fewer women die in the UK from breast cancer each year than before the screening programme was introduced. To return to the debate on screening for prostate cancer. We are now at a critical inflection point in the history of prostate cancer screening. Last year, Prostate Cancer UK published research that showed prostate cancer diagnosis is safer and more accurate than ever before, and this in part is thanks to research the charity funded leading to MRI – Magnetic Resonance Imaging – being introduced into the diagnostic pathway. The National Screening Committee, under the iron baton of its excellent chair, is currently deliberating on the evidence for and against screening for prostate cancer and will issue a report this year. In heavily trailed remarks, Wes Streeting has indicated that he is in favour of screening but not for everyone, just for selective high risk groups of men. We at Prostate Cancer UK welcome this ministerial support, for it is also our view that there is a need for screening, and we believe the evidence is now there for targeted screening. We welcome his remarks at a time when we are about to launch TRANSFORM, a multi-centre screening trial using sophisticated technologies based on current diagnostic tools, an adaptive trial that is open to new screening tests. Prostate Cancer UK's trial invests £42m in a very long-term campaign to assess the survival benefits of modern screening methods. So, who are Mr Streeting's selective high risk groups of men at increased risk of prostate cancer? These are men with family histories of prostate cancer who constitute 1 to 5 per cent of all diagnosed patients, and black men, who have a one in four risk of prostate cancer, which is twice the risk of white men. What to do whilst we await the Screening Committee's conclusions? Currently GP guidelines concerning testing for prostate cancer are outdated. We urgently need these NHS guidelines updated to empower GPs to proactively start conversations about PSA testing with men from the age of 45 at highest risk. This puts the power of informed choice back in the hands of men who need it the most and is a crucial step on the path to early diagnosis. So, yes, prostate cancer is a bit of a nuisance, but let us see if we can do something about that nuisance. Prof Jonathan Waxman OBE is the founder and president of Prostate Cancer UK