Hi Cleveland 3
Sorry, I wasn’t ignoring you but only just seen your thread.
As far as I am aware the Royal London Hospital is the only hospital helideck in the UK that has a full time in-house dedicated firecrew, however I stand to be corrected if my information is not up to date. Up until recently this was an external contracted service.
The reason the RLH has a full time crew is because the London Air Ambulance positions to the hospital each morning and is based there all day, 7 days a week, 365 day a year until end of days play when it goes back to Denham Aerodrome, whereas all the other hospitals only receive air ambulance movements as required, which could be a couple of times a day or a couple of times a month depending on the hospital and the medical/clinical services available. Subsequently at these other hospitals there is no requirement for fulltime crews.
Nonetheless all hospital helidecks should have professionally competent trained firecrews to cover all air ambulance arrivals and departures, however, the ‘firecrew’ will more than likely be rostered on-call from portering, security and such like departments as part of their normal daily hospital duties as Morri has suggested.
Training should be to offshore helideck fire crew standards but in my experience that is often not the case. Training a person to these standards and providing PPE etc is very expensive and ongoing and remember how cash strapped the NHS is! Dare I say that in some instances I have known a hospital to only pay lip service to the training required i.e. “there’s a waste paper bin and there’s a fire extinguisher”!
As for salaries and pay scales etc there is absolutely no parity with fulltime airport fire services and realistically there is nowhere else to go to progress a career in the fire services.
FC1
