Essex: Air Ambulance Saving Lives Through The Night

27 March 2014, 00:00 | Updated: 27 March 2014, 08:12

The Essex and Herts Air Ambulance is extending its service beyond the hours of daylight.

The charity has launched two brand new state-of-the-art cars which will run on Friday and Saturday night's, when the helicopters are unable to fly.

Doctor Ben Clarke told Heart: "We know that a good proportion of people get injured overnight and unfortunately in the East of England there's just no cover overnight.

"This allows us to get to people in Essex and Hertfordshire in a very timely fashion at all hours and I think we can bring the hospital to the patient in the middle of the night."

Deputy Clinical Manager Ben Myer has been working on the project for the past 18 months, he told us: "We identified key times when people have accidents and the high speed injuries tend to occur between 9 o'clock at night and 3 o'clock in the morning so we've targeted those times to run the cars at night."

The Vauxhall Insignia response cars carry everything that the helicopters carry and can travel at up to 150MPH.

The charity wants to look at running the service 24/7 once the trial period is over.