Dr Stu Reid is the Medical Director at Yorkshire Air Ambulance.

He shares how doctors bring hospital-level care directly to the roadside, from advanced procedures like pre-hospital anaesthesia to critical teamwork with paramedics and pilots.

You also hear what it takes to provide rapid emergency care across Yorkshire, the split-second decisions that can save lives, and how Stu’s career led him from volunteering to shaping the charity’s medical direction.

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If you want to find out more about Yorkshire Air Ambulance you can visit our website Yorkshire Air Ambulance

Welcome to Summat In t'Air, the podcast by Yorkshire Air Ambulance. 2025 marks 25 years of Yorkshire Air Ambulance flying helicopters and saving lives across the region. So to celebrate, we're sharing stories of rescues and a glimpse of life at the charity.

I try and think two or three steps ahead. I try and think about. Right, okay, so we're doing this now, but in the next five minutes we're going to need to get the patient packaged onto a stret, onto the helicopter. So what's going to happen next?

Having a doctor on the Air Ambulance means we can take the hospital to the patient, wherever they are. Dr. Stu Reed is Yorkshire Air Ambulance's medical director. He told me what that role involves.

It's a new role for YAA, I've been in post for about 18 months now. Clearly I'm one of the doctors in terms of my provision of care to the patient, so I do as many shifts as everybody else, but I also do a lot of office work and work in the background, which is probably the more significant part of my role as medical director. It's a very multifaceted role. Some of it is about direct patient care, what we do to the patient. So writing new guidelines, writing new operating procedures, making sure that we're delivering best practice. So what's the current evidence, what's the current literature say? What have we picked up at recent conferences? How are we going to make sure that we deliver the absolute best care for the patients? But there's more to it than that as well. There's how we organize ourselves on base as a group of doctors, as a group of paramedics. We work very closely, we work in partnership with Yorkshire Ambulance Service.

So I spend a lot of time working with them. And that can be anything from a patient guideline to a policy to looking at how we provide care across the whole of Yorkshire. And we're part of a regional service in terms of providing critical care to our patients, really. And I guess that's predominantly patients that are injured, but it's also patients that suffer medical problems and the obvious one for us is cardiac arrest, so patients whose hearts have stopped. So we're part of a system really. So part of my role is working with those regional partners and that includes the hospitals as well, in terms of making sure we deliver best care. There's also a kind of public facing part of the role as well. We work, we have a board of trustees that oversee every.

Everything we do within the charity. Most of them aren't doctors, they're not medical. So working with them for them to understand what's important for patient care. And clearly I'm interfacing as well with the staff within the charity, the fantastic work they do. So the charity senior management team considering aspects about fundraising and money, HR, finance. So it's a really broad scope of a job. I very much enjoy it. It's challenging at times, but it's a real pleasure.

And I think fundamentally, you know, I can speak for all of the doctors that we enjoy what we do because we love working for the organisation and fundamentally, it's about the best treatment for the good folk of Yorkshire. And that's why we're all here.

Just to explain to listeners, your radio goes off every now and then. It's an essential piece of kit, just in case you get a call out. So if you can hear a bleep, that's what it is.

Yeah, my apologies for that. So it's a normal. It's a proper day shift for me today.

Okay. So let's rewind a few years. Why did you want to become a doctor?

Wow. Thought you said this wasn't going to be an interview, Jon. I think for me, I enjoyed science at school, but I was also someone that didn't want to sit in a darkened room or a laboratory for my life, really. So I think it was about applying science to people and I think that took me to med school. I had a very open mind at med school about what I. What I thought I might end up doing. I thought I might be a GP, I thought I might be an orthopaedic surgeon. I thought all sorts of things.

But I can safely say that now the only job I could really do and be happy would be what I do now, which is half emergency medicine. So I work in Northern General Hospital as an A&E consultant and I'm half Yorkshire Air Ambulance. So, yeah, it was about applying science to people and I think that's, for me, that's worked very well. It's allowed me to interact with people, but apply that sort of scientific knowledge in that sphere, really. And I guess the other thing about. The thing I like about emergency medicine, along with working with the people, is part of your shift, you get to be thoughtful. Part of the shift, you get to be practical. You know, there's a lot of practical procedures.

So, you know, manipulating broken limbs, relocating dislocated joints, suturing people up. You know, there's a very hands on, practical side as well. So, yeah, it's a very diverse role really. So you get to use your medical knowledge in fun Ways and ways that are relevant to real life and you get to see the best and worst of humanity, probably all in one day.

And did you wake up one morning and think, I'm a doctor now my next step is to go onto the Yorkshire Air Ambulance. Was that something that you thought that you really wanted to do?

I think looking back, I'd have always been interested in the kind of work that we do on the air ambulance. I remember watching a TV programme probably when I was either at university or shortly after qualifying, and some of the original TV programmes were recorded down in London with London HEMs, that continue to be a kind of world leading air ambulance organisation really. So, you know, we look to London Hems a lot and we learn a lot from them. And there was a consultant called Gareth Davis who is very famous, very eminent in our world. And I watched Gareth doing, I think it was a medical cardiac arrest in a stairwell. And I think he delivered a general anesthetic. And I was just blown away that literally they were doing what we would do in the resuscitation room of the hospital, but they're doing it in a dark, dingy stairwell in the middle of London at 10 o' clock at night. And it blew my mind.

You know, we, we didn't have paid doctor shifts, so I did a couple of years of volunteering down there and you can't do it without the right experience and skills and knowledge as well. So I was building my knowledge courses, conferences, and it sort of morphed into something that was possible. And I guess at the same time pre hospital care across the UK was expanding. You know, air ambulance organisations were cropping up and establishing themselves. Doctors were very much part of that. So it happened kind of organically. But looking back, those were the seeds really. And as I say to my kind of trainee doctors and people that are early on in their careers, you know, they they ask me how I got into it and I think it's just about taking an idea and taking ambition and actually these things are possible.

And, you know, I've had an incredible career already, so fortunate to have to have worked in, in these areas and air ambulance, so. But you got a dare to dream and you've got to. You got to pick up your dream and go for it. And now I'm here.

You got a big smile on your face, so you obviously, obviously enjoy it when the siren goes off. What do you do once you've passed through this door?

So I write on my thing, on my leg, my leg board, what time the job came in, because it was important to have a point of reference. Sometimes I take the time to have a very brief chat with the dispatcher that's working on the desk. They've had access to the job, they know why we're being called. Sometimes it's worth just a couple of moments, just establishing what the job is. Is there any more information we need? The last job was Sheffield, I live in Sheffield, so I just tried to find out where it was because sometimes you can add a bit of local knowledge in terms of where you're going. We then move through to the hangar, pick up our helmet, put our helmet on, put our flight jacket on, make sure that our radio's on and ready to go. We move through to the aircraft, we get the signal from the pilot that we're safe to enter the aircraft. We hop onto the aircraft, we plug in our radio and then there's a series of standard checks that we do prior to takeoff to check that the helicopter's ready and check that we're ready to go.

And for us in the back, that means that we're strapped in, everything's secure in the back, there are no loose articles. And during that time, you're kind of thinking about the job as well, which is difficult. The aviation stuff and a safe takeoff clearly takes precedent at that point in time. But as things progress and as we move nearer to the job, we're discussing things like where the nearest hospital is, where the nearest trauma centre is. So we're thinking about where we're going to go with the patient. Sometimes the logistics are complicated around that. Sometimes it's may be quicker or easier to actually take the patient in a land ambulance. So the role of the helicopter for those jobs may be to drop us at the scene and then the onward transfer would be by land.

It's not always quicker to fly the patient, but, you know, certainly a lot of the time, with our patch, we cover an enormous geographical area and having that ability to fly the patient is a huge, huge asset.

So when you land at the site, you jump out of the helicopter. What's going through your mind, what are you thinking? And what sort of procedures can you do that might surprise the general public?

First of all, on approach the scene, perhaps the most important thing is that we're safe to approach. So particularly if we're first on scene, then we need to appreciate, are there any hazards around? You know, you mentioned a road traffic collision. Is there any oil on the road? Is there an engine fire? Is there glass? Is the road closed? Is there traffic that's trying to get through? And actually, you know, the most important thing is to make sure that we are safe as a team going in. And then I think whether it's an injured patient or an ill patient, there's a process of information gathering that you'd go through on your approach. So you're picking up clues. So it's a motorbike crash. Is the patient near where the motorbike was? Have they been thrown a long distance? Is there skid marks on the road? Are we on a 20 mile an hour urban road or are we on a motorway in terms of what might have happened, the sort of energy involved in the incident? If we're going to a medical cardiac arrest patient, I'm gathering information, is there medications on the scene, a patient relative that might be able to give me some information? And then as you approach the patient, what does the patient themselves look like? And you know, I think one of the things that as doctors, we in hospital, we call it the end of the bedoram, which, which basically means your first look at the patient and what's your gut feeling. And when you've been doing it as long as I have and as long as a lot of the doctors here have, you get a fairly good idea fairly early on by picking up those clues and looking at your patient.

So we're already getting an idea of how poorly my patient is and how quickly you need to act. You mentioned procedures. Perhaps it's a good time to talk about stuff that we can do as doctors that is in addition to what our paramedic colleagues can do. And increasingly paramedics are able to do more and more and developing roles within the ambulance service when they can do more and more. There's a few things that sort of set us apart though, as doctors. Probably the most obvious one, and the one that perhaps the public listening will be most aware of, would be the concept of a pre hospital emergency anaesthetic, or a FIA for short. Essentially, it's putting a patient to sleep at the side of the road or in the field or wherever we find them. We do that predominantly for two reasons.

In the context of a patient who's injured, often if they have a head injury, they will be in a state of semi consciousness or unconsciousness, where it's very important that we take over their breathing for them. We make sure their breathing tubes or their airway remains open. Because we know that patients after a head injury can lose their airways, they lose their ability to keep the breathing tubes open for themselves. And we also know that by taking over control of their breathing and to an extent, control of their blood pressure, that we can give them, give the brain the perfect conditions to recover. We can't change that initial blow that the brain has received, whether it be bruising, bleeding, pressure in the brain, we can't change that that's happened. But what we can do is give the brain the best possible condition. So it's about making sure it's got enough blood supply, making sure it's got enough oxygen, making sure that the patient has a normal temperature, normal blood sugar, and all these things are best achieved by provision of that general anaesthetic. The other group of patients that we may need to do an anaesthetic on is perhaps after a cardiac arrest.

So the heart stops beating. Either us or the land ambulance crew are able to restart it. Often when that patient, if their heart does restart, they're yet to get a lot of blood back to their brain. And really they may remain in that sort of semi conscious or unconscious state, just really through the shock of what's happened to them. So in order to go under anaesthetic, there's two fundamental things that need to happen. You need to have a good dose of a sedative agent, so something that's going to send you off to sleep. But in terms of, I mentioned securing the airway. So we do that by putting a breathing tube down through the mouth and down into the top of the lungs, into the trachea.

You can't do that if the patient hasn't had what we call a paralyzing agent. So we give a drug that will essentially paralyze all the muscles in the body, including those in the voice box. Clearly, we don't do that without the patient being asleep, because you don't want to be in a state of paralysis when you are awake and aware. So, yeah, that in essences ***a fear***, a pre hospital Emergency anaesthetic. It's a really important intervention. We do it several times a week on the unit at least.

Is there anything you can't do that can only be done at the hospital?

I work in A and E, I work in a major trauma centre. The majority of things that we do to the patients on arrival in A and E, we can also do pre hospital, so we can do after we've arrived at the patient, essentially, which is fantastic. And I think what we're realising now with both injured patients and medical cardiac arrest patients, is that there's a kind of magic window where for certain patient groups, if you don't do something, then, then their chance of survival either radically diminishes or completely disappears. That's not the case for all patients, but for the right ones, having us there at, at the roadside is vital in the context of what we've just discussed. You know, the patient that's got a head injury can't keep their breathing tubes open. Us doing an anaesthetic and delivering oxygen to their brain absolutely can be life saving. You can't leave that half an hour to do it in hospital because you've lost your chance. The other obvious patient group, talking about the next sort of doctor intervention in inverted commas, where we only have a very, very limited time, is in the context of.

Of chest injuries and specifically either stab or gunshot wounds to the chest. And the procedure that we do for these patients when their heart has stopped beating or their blood pressure is unrecordable, is we would do what's called a resuscitative thoracotomy. And this is a procedure to essentially open the chest and look at the vital organs, specifically the heart. And there's certain injuries within the chest. And the particular one that we're looking for is when the heart lives in a sac and the sac is fixed, it can't expand. So if you get a stab wound that goes through the sac and into the heart muscle, what you'll get within the sac is an expanding mass of blood that will squeeze the heart smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until the heart can't beat anymore. And that condition is called cardiac tamponade. So if you can open the chest, you can do a big cut between the ribs and you pull the ribs apart and you look for the heart.

If you can release the pressure in the sac, then that heart will potentially start beating again and again. If you don't do that in a timely fashion, you've probably got. Every case is different, but you've probably got 15 minutes from the time that their heart stops or their blood pressure plummets in order to do that procedure. So that's a real sort of signature procedure in terms of what we do as doctors pre hospital. You know, these are happening multiple times on our unit, you know, in the last year, I think five or six at least. There's been a number done more recently as well. So, you know, it's more than stabilizing the patient. I think, you know, in this case, it's reanimating them, it's giving them a chance of survival because without this, they will die.

And again, you can't wait to get to hospital because your chance is gone, the window's closed.

So essentially you have like an operating theatre on site. Like you say, it could be in a stairwell, it could be up on the on the Yorkshire moors somewhere. And in an operating theatre, it's a team of people, isn't it? So how important is teamwork when you're in the middle of this emergency situation?

Massively important things need to happen quickly. One of the unique things about what we do is you don't always know your team before you start. So we will know our pilots, technical crew members, paramedics, very, very well. And we train together, we do simulated cases, we've done shifts together before. We know perhaps intuitively how each other works. We may go to the scene of an accident or something else, and you meet members of the ambulance service that you never worked with before, and you have to establish a team then and there with people that you haven't worked with before. And that's part of the reason why we work to protocols and guidelines that everyone understands, so you have a mutual understanding of what you need to do. But our ability to get the best out of that group of people at the time really is very, very important.

What we try and avoid as well is the sort of effect of us turning up in our orange flight suits, taking over, shouting at everybody. And I think, you know, for us it's about getting the best out of that scene. But things do have to happen quickly. So one tactic that I do, I try and think two or three steps ahead. I try and think about, right, okay, so we're doing this now, but in the next five minutes, we're going to need to get the patient packaged onto a stretcher, onto the helicopter. So, yeah, what, what's going to happen next? But, but you're right, you know, we do, We are a little bit like an operating theatre or a resuscitation room that flies to the patient side, wherever they are in Yorkshire. And working as a team, it's pivotal, it really is, because you can be the best sort of technically in the world at a procedure, but unless you can work with people to deliver that, it's not going to happen.

So I think that's a common thread that runs through certainly our clinical team and we work well as a team with, with the charity and our other partners as well. So, yeah, that's very much an enjoyable part of the job.

So, Stu, can you remember your first shift here at the Yorkshire Air Ambulance?

I do. I remember it vividly. I've come back to YAA having been away working another hour ambulance for about 10 years. So I've done all my training, done. On my induction, I was all ready to go, met some of the paramedics for the first time. Phone goes off and before I know it, we are in the car and we are going to a patient in cardiac arrest and we needed to do a thoracotomy, so we need to open their chest. This was the first time I'd worked with these particular paramedics. Happily, we all worked together really, really well as a team.

But it was a first shift back that I will not forget. I wasn't sure coming back to Yorkshire, sort of how busy we'd be in comparison to the other services where I'd worked. And having worked here for a year and a half, I can confirm we are very busy. There's lots going on, there's lots of procedures going on. The need for an air ambulance here is self evident. The need to cover a big patch and to deliver the interventions that we can deliver is vital and I'm utterly convinced of that. Certainly landed in some unusual places. We've upset a number of sports ground managers and groundsmen, landed on bowling greens.

Getting to the job itself, I've been on a number of modes of transport. I've been on a bus, I've been on a tram. To get to the job, I've accepted lifts from all manner of members of the public. We've been in the back of police cars getting to the job. Probably the best mode of transport is a kind of a ute, a kind of pickup truck where you literally throw the bags in the back and hop in the front and off you go.

Sounds very exciting. You jump out of a helicopter into a bus. Did you just flag it down?

They let us on for free. No, no. Fair, but no. It can be, you know, it sounds bizarre, but it can be the quickest way of doing that last bit of the journey.

So obviously, Stu, you're not always out on call. You sometimes hear back at base, what's your favourite thing to do back at base here when you're not working?

When we work a weekend as docs, we tend to do the two shifts back to back Saturday, Sunday. So before I've even started at work, I like to go for a run around the base either over to Nostell Priory. There's loads of fantastic countryside around the base and you know it's there from flying, but actually when you're on the ground it's even better. So spent a lot of time exploring some really cool and unusual places around the base. There's loads of wildlife around, so that's before the shift started. Sadly I can't go for a run during my shift, but we get on very well as a team. I enjoy talking to the paramedics, the pilots, the TCMs, finding out what they've been up to in their normal day to day lives. From the medical perspective, one thing I really enjoy doing is talking with the crews about jobs they've been to.

And I guess it's part of debrief as well. You know, it's, it's talking through what went well, what didn't go well, learning, because there's always learning in it for, for them, for me, for everybody. So, you know, it's fascinating to find out what, what the unit have been up to. It would almost be impossible for me to read about every job that we've, we've done, but just hearing some anecdote and some stories and, and sharing people's experiences, you know, really adds to my own own interest in the role, but also my own education and development as well.

So what's your favourite Yorkshire saying that you've picked up working up here?

I've probably got two. I like reyt good. And I like to think about everything we do. Reyt good care delivering to the patients and you could almost use that as the overall aim of why we're here. The other one that, that I love is actually a description of a part of the body and I learned this when I was working in Barnsley in the A and E there. And it's the description of the dangly bit at the back of your throat, which the medical term is your uvula, but in Yorkshire it's your clacker. So when, when the patient came in and I asked what's, what can I do for you? And he said, it's my clacker, Doctor, there's something wrong with it.

I had to ask. I had to ask what it was and I was quite glad that it was the clacker and not something else.

But when you started talking about dangly bit, I was a bit worried actually. But clacker, yes. So, Stu, it's been wonderful talking to you. I've been on the edge of my seat listening to some of the procedures that you've described and thanks for opening up to us, but just before we go, I've got a little bit of a sore on my clacker. Could you have a look at it for me, please?

Absolutely not. I do get asked very odd questions from people either in the pub. Can you just look at this? Some of the things I can't really mention. Can you just look at this X ray for me? I do get a steady stream of questions like that. Hopefully I'll give the right answers.

Hearing from Stu really shows how much expertise goes into every single mission. Not just flying the helicopter, but delivering hospital level care wherever it's needed. If you'd like to find out more about our doctors, paramedics, pilots and volunteers, you can meet the team online@yorkshireairambulance.org UK where you can easily donate. Thank you for listening to Summat in t'Air. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please share it and tell your friends to listen.