Thames Valley Air Ambulance

Thames Valley Air Ambulance (TVAA) provides emergency medical services to Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxford in South East England. Operating one helicopter (currently G-TVLY, an Airbus135) from RAF Benson and five ground vehicles, TVAA supports the National Health Service (NHS). It provides fast incident response across the three counties. Each vehicle is deployed with a doctor and a paramedic to provide the best possible pre-hospital emergency medicine (PHEM) care.

“If you have a critical injury or a life-threatening medical emergency, you want to know there’s help,” says Sarah Roberts, one of TVAA’s Non-Executive Directors. “We need to know that we can get people to hospital the fastest way possible.”

Critically, TVAA is a charity funded entirely by public donations, operating through the Thames Valley Air Ambulance Charitable Trust.

“Many people support us because they say, ‘I use it, or I might use it,” Roberts says. “They think of it as a kind of insurance policy. They want that fast response if anything happens to them or anyone they know.” Assisted by volunteer charity collectors as well as fund-raising events and a lottery, TVAA is a complex operation spanning helicopters, road vehicles, medical care, patient data management, charity, gambling and training, as well as the more usual challenges associated with any operation of comparable size.

Good governance is critical to its success and sustainability, but the organisation needed more than manual, paper- and email-based systems could deliver. It needed to update its board and governance capabilities to thrive and continue providing its life-saving services.

“The old system was that board papers were mostly just emailed out,” says Roberts. “Some people like working with paper, but if anything had to be updated … here’s another email.”

OnBoard provided the security, convenience and board-related capabilities that TVAA needed across every part of its complex structure. From helicopter operations and treating patients to staff training and volunteer fundraising, TVAA’s board now have secure access to the information they need to make good decisions faster, no matter where they’re located.