North-east emergencies to feature in new Channel 4 TV series Rescue: Extreme Medics
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A new Channel 4 TV series is set to feature emergencies in the north-east and the work of the Scottish Trauma Network.
Rescue: Extreme Medics will follow an elite team of clinicians who assist patients who cannot make it to the emergency room in time by bringing the hospital direct to the hillside, saving lives like never before.
The first episode will be screened tonight on Channel 4 at 9pm featuring an incident in Aberdeenshire.
The network serves the entire population of Scotland, spread over 30,000 square miles of land bringing the hospital to the wilderness, as they provide a lifeline for more than 5.4 million people.
Scotland has some of the most challenging geography in Europe, which means that emergency medicine works under a completely different set of pressures to the rest of the UK.
This is medical intervention at its extreme best, and quite unlike anything people have ever seen before.
In the ambulance control centre in Glasgow specialist clinicians are monitoring almost 5000 999 calls across Scotland daily, to identify patients in greatest need of trauma team interventions. Able to task a limited number of assets its vital that they send resources to patients at greatest risk.
Trauma remains the fourth leading cause of death in western countries and is the leading cause of death in people under 40.
In Scotland around 4000 people are seriously injured each year. Out of these around 800-1000 are being defined as a "major trauma".
Additionally, it’s estimated 100 cases of major trauma a year happen to under 16s.
The Scottish Trauma Network (STN) was founded in the summer of 2017. It works across five facets of trauma care: prevention, pre-hospital, acute, rehabilitation and major incident planning.
The STN works collaboratively with hospitals across Scotland and the Scottish Ambulance Service. It also has access to Scotland’s four major trauma centres: Aberdeen Royal Infirmary (North), Ninewells Hospital (East), Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh (South East), and Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (West).
The North of Scotland Trauma Network includes the Major Trauma Centre at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and connects five health boards: NHS Grampian, NHS Highland, NHS Orkney, NHS Shetland and NHS Western Isles.
The East of Scotland Trauma Network includes the Major Trauma Centre at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee and covers Tayside and North Fife.
The South East of Scotland Trauma Network includes the Major Trauma Centre at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, and covers NHS Borders, NHS Fife, NHS Forth Valley and NHS Lothian.
The West of Scotland Trauma Network includes the Major Trauma Centre at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow and covers NHS Ayrshire and Arran, NHS Dumfries and Galloway, NHS Lanarkshire, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and NHS Highland (Argyll and Bute).
The Major Trauma Desk is based in Glasgow’s Ambulance Control Centre. The Trauma Desk monitors all incoming 999 calls to identify patients who have suffered major trauma and dispatch the appropriate teams.
The Emergency Medical Retrieval Service (EMRS) Trauma Team is the team that attends to major trauma calls, it has two bases: one in the West of Scotland at Glasgow Airport and the other in the North at Aberdeen Airport.
EMRS has experts in pre-hospital critical care, it has 27 retrieval consultants, six retrieval practitioners and two registrars.
The service undertakes 1000 retrievals missions a year working collaboratively with the Scottish Ambulance Service. The team is ready to respond by helicopter or fast response vehicle within minutes of activation.
It is equipped to provide emergency anaesthesia, advanced analgesia and sedation, chest injury management, blood transfusion and surgical cricothyroidotomy.
The first episode features the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary hospital trauma team which assembles to treat 51-year-old cyclist Craig who has had a head on collision with a digger bucket in a small farming area of rural Aberdeenshire.
For registrar Jasmine, who has previously worked in London, this case brings a whole new set of challenges as she tries to get to grips with the unique rural incidents that she is faced with in Aberdeen.
In the second episode next week the North trauma team and air ambulance are dispatched to 55-year-old Iain who has crashed his plane minutes after take-off and fallen 100 feet from the sky. Sixty miles from the nearest major trauma centre in Aberdeen, the amateur pilot has a significant head injury and multiple serious injuries.
As trauma consultant Catharina Hartman prepares the team for the patient’s arrival, she contemplates what condition the patient might be in - “100 feet that’s around 10 stories. So, if you were to fall that height from a building, well no one could survive that.”
Lucky to be alive he is taken to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, however as the team begin to assess the extent of his injuries serious concern is raised about the significance of his spinal injury and whether Iain will ever walk again.
The show also features staff including nurse Emma Fraser (29) who is originally from Fort William and now lives in Aberdeenshire.
She works within the emergency department, working 12-hour shifts both day and night shift as part of the multidisciplinary team to look after medical and trauma patients.
