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Yesteryear Road Run Fundraising

This year's Yesteryear Road Run has achieved the incredible milestone of
breaking through the £100,000 barrier in funds raised for Magpas!

Magpas would like to extend a huge thank you to the members of YESTERYEAR.

To read more, Click Here

Magpas History

Magpas was formed in 1971. In those days it was known as the Mid Anglia General Practitioner Accident Service (MAGPAS).

It was the brainchild of Dr Neville Silverston MBE, a GP in Bottisham. Neville started a radio paging business for GPs so they could be called out after hours. For this innovation, Neville was given an award as one of the GPs of the year.

When he went to London to collect his award he met another GP who was being celebrated, Dr Ken Easton. Dr Easton had started something called an `Immediate Care Scheme’ in North Ridings, Yorkshire. This involved GPs going to the scenes of road traffic accidents.

The two doctors soon realised that the radio pager would help the scheme in Yorkshire and the Immediate Care scheme would help in and around Cambridgeshire (the `Mid Anglia’ region as it was called by the police in those days).

MAGPAS was born!

Under the leadership of Dr Silverston and Dr Dereck Cracknell (a GP from Huntingdon), MAGPAS soon earned a reputation as the leading immediate care scheme in the country.

In the early days the GPs were called away from their practices and travelled to the scene in their own cars.

Over the following 30 years, there were many developments and improvements within the Ambulance service itself and it became clear that for MAGPAS to continue to add patient benefit it would need to change. In 2000 Dr Mackenzie a MAGPAS volunteer but a hospital based Consultant in Emergency Medicine reassessed the MAGPAS service and put forward a plan to change the operation into doctors and paramedics being highly trained and working in teams of two. Rota shifts were put in place to enable the teams to be located centrally.

The Emergency Medical Team started using the police helicopter to get to incidents that were further afield. The team is now co-located with the police Air Operations Unit at RAF Wyton.

From September 2007, they were joined by Anglia Two, a dedicated Air Ambulance helicopter operated by the East Anglian Air Ambulance charity.

The Magpas Emergency Medical Team training course has long been widely regarded as the best in the UK and it is one of the reasons doctors and paramedics travel from all over the country to join Magpas.

At the same time as the charity implemented the Emergency Medical Team it also created the Community First Responder Scheme. This involves training and equipping groups of local people so they can save lives in their local communities. Community First Responders go to incidents such as heart attacks, cardiac arrests and patients suffering from severe breathing difficulties etc.

On top of these two lifesaving services, Magpas also introduced a dedicated Trauma Research program that aimed to learn lessons from traumatic injury. This is the only kind of research of its type in the UK. The charity now works in partnership with Leicester University on the Trauma Research and the resulting papers will be published later this year.