EMS hoverboards are go!

Great Western Air Ambulance Charity (GWAAC) has announced that it will be the first helicopter air ambulance service in the UK to use ‘hoverboards’ to reach critically ill and injured patients. The service stated that an independent analysis has shown a need to modernise the way its crew members travel to incidents. In line with this finding, from 1 April GWAAC has given up using its critical care cars to attend incidents in favour of hoverboards, with personnel carrying their medical equipment on their backs. A rising cost in fuel and maintenance was a factor in the decision to shift from four wheels to one, deadpanned GWAAC.

Each hoverboard has a maximum speed of 15 mph (24 kph) and will allow team members to reach areas that are inaccessible by road, or where there is no landing site for the helicopter.

GWAAC‘s head of hoverboard intergration (sic) Stephen Hartill said: “Replacing our critical care cars has been something we have been planning for a while, and I really feel that the hoverboard is the perfect solution. We are increasingly called to help patients in urban areas where it is difficult for us to land a helicopter. The introduction of our critical care hoverboards will ensure that we can rapidly deploy in urban environments like Bristol, Bath or Gloucester.”

Were this to be an April Fool’s story, of course AMR would garner bad luck by reposting it after 12:00 hrs UK time on 1 April, but the charity’s video was uploaded on 31 March so this story is clearly entirely real and we applaud GWAAC’s pioneering approach.