Magpas Background

Magpas was the brainchild of Dr Neville Silverston MBE. He commenced an out of hour’s radio paging service for local GP’s in 1971. This quickly evolved into an immediate care scheme where GP’s were called to the scenes of road traffic accidents in their area. It became a registered charity in 1972

The Mid Anglia General Practitioner Accident Service had taken its first steps under the care of Dr Silverston and Dr Derek Cracknell a GP from Huntingdon. This service was voluntary and the doctors responded in their own cars. They provided expertise to the fledgling ambulance service.

The next 30 years saw the Ambulance service evolve developing their staff and their fields of expertise. They became better equipped to deal with all manner of emergencies.

In 2000 Dr Mackenzie a Consultant in Emergency Medicine based in hospital and a Magpas volunteer, reviewed the service provided by Magpas. He proposed that to continue to provide added patient benefit, the charity needed to provide specialist care at the scene of more serious incidences. By January 2003 the plans were formalised, this was the birth of the Emergency Medical Teams (EMT). These teams were doctor- paramedic based; they received specialised and ongoing training. They became centralised and worked shift patterns, providing a highly skilled, scarce resource to rare events.

These specialised team were deployed by road in a dedicated rapid response vehicle to serious incidences and from 1997 by police helicopter. In 2007 they were joined by Anglia two, an air ambulance helicopter operated by the East Anglia Air Ambulance Charity (EAAA). The helicopter Anglia two was withdrawn from joint operations in 2010. The Magpas Helimedix team is still stationed along side the police helicopter unit at RAF Wyton.

Alongside the development of the EMT, Dr Mackenzie also proposed the development of Community First Responders. These would be lay responders within a community, specially trained and equipped to respond to medical emergencies within their communities the first groups were launched in 2001.

Both teams were underpinned by strong clinical governance arrangements.

At this time Magpas also became involved in a research program that aimed to learn from the data that was available to them as to lessons that could be learned from traumatic injury that could help to save lives into the future. CTARP – Cambridge Trauma & Audit research Project. This research was in conjunction with Leicester University Hospital and partially funded by the Department of health