Price of fuel an 'ongoing concern', says Midlands Air Ambulance
It's as the conflict in Iran has led to a rise in the cost of fuel
A charity which provides life-saving pre-hospital care across the Midlands and into some of Gloucestershire through an helicopter-led service has said the price of fuel is a worry for them.
Prices have risen as a result of the conflict in the Middle East between the United States and Israel with Iran, which is near to one of the main shipping routes for fuel in the Strait of Hormuz.
Associate clinical operations director for the Midlands Air Ambulance, Julian Spiers, said they had "anticipated" that the price was likely to go up and it had ensured it was "topped up" at that point.
He said though they were preparing for a "significant increase, possibly up to double" in costs next time they go to top up.
"It is a worry for us, it's something that we're doing some business continuity planning on and it is an ongoing concern that we are monitoring," Mr Spiers said.
"A lot of our aviation fuel comes from that sort of part of the world and we are seeing some volatility in the prices.
"We are seeing that the price is going to go up, we were paying sort of over 60p a litre at one point and that's now gone up to over a pound and 5p a litre at least, we're seeing the prices double effectively.
"When we tend to buy, we tend to buy in bulk to keep the price down, but essentially we are sort of seeing the cost to the charity actually doubling over the period of the conflict and who knows where it's going to go in the future."
The charity, which is marking its 35th anniversary this year, has been in operation since its first mission back in 1991.
It works across Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, as well as parts of the West Midlands and Gloucestershire, with Mr Spiers saying it was also facing cost pressures from other areas as well.
He said: "As an independent charity, we don't get any NHS or government funding and it effectively means that the money that we're raising has to go to providing the essential services.
"It's not just the fuel increase, we've seen other sort of prices go up as well, we've seen essentially the equipment and everything is going up as cost of inflation goes up, we've seen sort of incremental increases in sort of like tax and national insurance contributions as well which we were affected by.
"So it's important that we use all of our money that comes in from voluntary donations carefully."
He added that their priority of getting to patients quickly and delivering the life-saving pre-hospital care that they need "remains unchanged".