East England Ambulance rides the Airwave

The NHS has commenced the rollout of the Airwave secure digital radio network to ambulance teams throughout England, starting with East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust (EEAST).

The service is the first of 32 trusts that originally signed up to Airwave. According to the NHS, Airwave will be rolled out to the rest of the country by 2009.

Airwave, which has already been adopted by a number of police forces, gives users a resilient, clear comms line that can be shared by many users within each service or by two or more emergency services at one time, making it easier to organise an effective response to any emergency.

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EEAST chief operating officer for Essex, Paul Leaman, told silicon.com: "The key factor for us is the guarantee of clear and accurate voice calls for the first time since I can remember, and I've been in the service for 28 years.

"Before we started using Airwave, it wasn't uncommon to have signals from local taxi companies and Cambridge Ambulance Service bleeding into ours. Now we have confidence that messages about patients won't be overheard and errors won't creep into the message due to patchy coverage."

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A paramedic from the service explained that zero-coverage areas have been all but eradicated and so far there have been no outages. EEAST hopes to bring in data communications on top of voice in the next few weeks, which will reduce the amount of time it takes to mobilise ambulance crews from minutes to seconds.

He said: "At the moment there is a pinch-point at the despatcher, who calls out the details of the emergency to the crew. Data mobilisation allows other individuals [to help the despatcher] mobilise vehicles."

Mobile data connectivity to ambulances is expected to be extended to patient telemetry. At the moment, crews use a GPRS service to relay 12-lead ECG (ElectroCardioGram) data to Accident & Emergency wards. This is expected to migrate to Airwave, although no timetable for this has been set.