Medevac Frontline, a young but locally based charity is there to provide and create vital paramedic services in many parts of the world. Areas of conflict and poverty where training, actual UK paramedics and structure are vital to bring paramedicine to these communities. Medevac Frontline are calling for volunteers, but not to act on the front lines of the world as paramedics, rather to make the efforts of the charity possible and to make it work. ‘Frontline 300’ volunteers are needed to create this platform, to help create funding, events, and spread knowledge and awareness of Medevac Frontline and what it does.
Medevac Frontline is the brainchild of Fergus Beeley, formerly with NHS South Western Ambulance Trust emergency response who, when out as a volunteer assisting in the medical evacuation of patients in Ukraine at the start of the conflict saw at first hand the lack of standardisation in skills in pre-hospital care and what that meant to the community there, and out of that came Medevac Frontline.
At that time Fergus’ career had been primarily as a wildlife film producer on many award-winning programmes for the BBC and National Geographic, including Sir David Attenborough’s Life of Birds, Planet Earth and Natural World. His role as producer meant that he was responsible for deploying film crews to challenging environments such as the remote arctic and the rainforests of the Amazon basin – making sure the teams would be safe and independent in these remote locations – and bring them home again after months away.
Ukraine changed all of that. Taking leave from this role in Bristol where he was editing a series on Birds, he took a film camera out to Ukraine, somewhere he knew well from his past travels as a wildlife documentary maker in the decades before. He thought that documenting the war on film would make a valuable record for news outlets. But he quickly realised that there was a much greater need – for assistance in essential medical evacuations.
For Fergus, something clicked: “I never switched the camera on. What I witnessed was often too shocking and not appropriate to film. Good emergency patient care was not always available. What was desperately needed, which I couldn’t see nor offer, was a more professional and standardised approach to emergency medical treatment of the wounded. It struck me hard. It was undoubtedly a life-changing time for me.”
On returning to the UK he registered a new Charity called Medevac Frontline. The objectives would be to deploy highly skilled UK paramedics to humanitarian disasters and conflict zones overseas. Whilst he had many transferrable skills – years as a wildlife film producer sending crews out to inhospitable parts of the world wasn’t that dissimilar to sending a medical team to a humanitarian disaster, he needed more and that’s when he joined UK’s South West Ambulance Service (SWAST) to train as an Emergency Care Assistant. He was soon on frontline operational response in an ambulance in the UK. Whilst at the same time developing Medevac Frontline.
As well as running the Charity, Fergus was able to learn first-hand many of the skills, standard operating procedures, medications and equipment used in emergency pre-hospital response. While working at SWAST, Fergus met a highly qualified Critical Care Paramedic, Pete Reeve, who had also volunteered in Ukraine and was hugely supportive of the Charity’s mission. But Medevac Frontline quickly snowballed into something that was more than Fergus could manage alongside working long shifts in the ambulance service. It was now 24/7 running the organisation.
There was an unfulfilled need for exactly what Medevac Frontline could bring and this was recognised by many organisations across the world. At the end of 2023 Medevac Frontline became a partner in the World Health Organisation (WHO)-led Emergency Medical Team (EMT) initiative and rapidly developed into a trusted operational partner. A year later, just weeks before the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, the organisation was approached by WHO to deliver emergency response training in mass casualty management and advanced life support to the six ambulance services across the Northwest of Syria, including the ‘White Helmets’.
Today? Medevac Frontline, though very small and highly specialist, is a recognised Non-Governmental Organisation having a status of being in ‘official relations’ with UN and a register of over 30 highly trained UK paramedics from which appropriate teams can be selected for deployment. Fergus doesn’t want the Charity to get any bigger. There is a need for all forms of backroom support. And this is where the call for volunteers comes in….
Fergus is local. Currently based in Malmesbury, originally from Salisbury but this area is where he comes from. Whilst any volunteers don’t have to be ‘local’, it helps.
Patron of Medevac Frontline is the legendary Sir Ranulph Fiennes OBE. “The crews that work with this remarkable charity tend to be a special breed of person – like the people I used to select for my expeditions – personally motivated to succeed, persevering through setbacks and giving up all their time to the task.” Is why he is committed to the charity.
To find out more about Medevac Frontline and the Frontline 300 Volunteer programme click here to visit the website, send an e-mail to info@medevacfrontline.org or to register as a volunteer directly use the QR Code below:
Live Music Night at the Town Hall for the Marlborough Area Youth Forum
