A day in the life: Lia's Wings
Dr Lee Collier is medical director of Lia’s Wings, a charity that provides hospital air transfers for critically ill babies and children.
A typical day...
I pick up any new requests for transfers, speak to medical teams at the hospitals involved and review the medical reports provided. I also arrange meetings between the charity team, flight platform and the NHS teams to discuss previous flights and make sure we are always reviewing our work to see where we can develop and improve the service.
We fly two or three patients each month, but this isn’t uniform across the year as we tend to have busy patches across school holidays. I’m always involved in planning each mission and am very hands-on with the family involved. Often families have been stuck in the wrong place for many weeks or even months. For families abroad they may not have had much information about their child’s care due to language and cultural barriers, so speaking to me as a British doctor might be their first opportunity to really explore and understand what has been happening to their child. Even for transfers within the UK, parents will have a lot of questions about how the flight will work and what will happen on the day.
When a baby has been born prematurely abroad, there is a process to request emergency travel documents in lieu of a passport. The process is complex and frustrating, so we provide practical support with this. Parents often need an emotional sounding board, so I share this responsibility with the charity CEO Charlotte Young, who is brilliant at supporting parents. We will typically have many phone calls and messages in the time leading up to a flight.
I do carry out a lot of the flights myself alongside a specialist nurse, but I’m trying to learn to delegate and we have a great team of consultants and nurse practitioners who are extremely capable!
I get a lot of support from our partners at Capital Air Ambulance to arrange the logistics of each flight and make sure the equipment is prepared and ready to go. During the flight, the specialist team use medical equipment to monitor oxygen levels, heart rate, blood pressure and temperature. For babies, their temperature is very important which is why most babies will travel in our flight incubator. We also have a handheld lab that can do blood tests in flight if needed.
We have an amazing team to raise funds and awareness of what we do. Amanda, our PR and events manager; Rebecca, our head of engagement; and Eloise, our fundraising assistant, work tirelessly to represent the charity and build support alongside the CEO, Charlotte. I get to join some fundraising events, sometimes just for the fun of it and sometimes to give a speech or presentation. A recent highlight was when we announced the charity’s new name and vision at an event hosted in an aircraft hangar in Bristol with Capital Air Ambulance.
the hardest thing...
…is telling parents that they’ll need to wait longer to come home. This might be because their child is too unwell to fly, but usually, it comes down to fundraising or needing to complete more paperwork for travel documents.
The best thing...
…is meeting a child and their parents in the hospital and seeing their look of relief when the Lia’s Wings team arrives to take them home.
Lia’s Wings is the UK’s only air ambulance charity, transforming lives through hospital air transfers for children. It provides holistic care for the whole family to ensure improved outcomes. Find out more here.
This is a feature from Issue 19 of Charitable Traveller.
by net effect