UK Air Ambulances having it off???
My local Air Ambulance is unfortunately the one shown as demonstrably inefficient. To anyone ITK why would over two-thirds of total expenditure be on raising funds? To add, this particular Air Ambulance has two heli's and two bases that are very well established and have been operating for years.
My local Air Ambulance is unfortunately the one shown as demonstrably inefficient. To anyone ITK why would over two-thirds of total expenditure be on raising funds? To add, this particular Air Ambulance has two heli's and two bases that are very well established and have been operating for years.
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Those numbers tell a tale. Although the number of employees earning within certain pay brackets or bands also tells a tale.
A charity previously earning more than the vast sum they are attempting to raise now, including by direct approach to government for tax payer funding, spending more than 50% on fundraising with so many employees and several in the 6 figure bands is ludicrous. One wonders if the charity commission look at those elements in detail.
https://register-of-charities.charit...details/801013
A charity previously earning more than the vast sum they are attempting to raise now, including by direct approach to government for tax payer funding, spending more than 50% on fundraising with so many employees and several in the 6 figure bands is ludicrous. One wonders if the charity commission look at those elements in detail.
https://register-of-charities.charit...details/801013
I have always been aware of the 'interesting' approach by "The Air Ambulance Service" [sic] to fund-raising, expenditure and emoluments, but I was taken aback by the number of high-paid "helpers" in Northernstar's link. Educational. On another subject: do TAAS still call every flight - including positioning, air-tests and the like - a "mission" for their annual stats?
It might be helpful to the public if charities could be obliged to print those pie-graphs nice and clearly next to their collection boxes and tins, in the hope that people might be a little more enquiring over where their hard-earned donations are actually going. Defo time to do some moral-compass-swings, methinks.
It might be helpful to the public if charities could be obliged to print those pie-graphs nice and clearly next to their collection boxes and tins, in the hope that people might be a little more enquiring over where their hard-earned donations are actually going. Defo time to do some moral-compass-swings, methinks.
Caution, alternative take on the charity sector.
I have no affinity or allegiance for or to any EMS operators, for profit or non profit, in the UK but I think there are several other ways of looking at these statistics and it's important to know exactly what is loaded into the 'admin' and what is loaded into the 'charitable activities' parts of these pie charts.
Some of these charities will load all their 'costs' into the admin, potentially including pilot and AME salaries, doctors. The 'money spent on charitable activities' could be direct flight costs only including fuel, landing fees, pbh etc. I'm not excusing anyone but I think it's important to have the full picture and realistic expectations as I doubt very much if the pie charts are as simple as 'office based' vs 'aircrew/ engineers'. I also doubt these stats are reported the same way by each charity.
Where I do take some issue with the comments made above is the rather odd insistence that somehow the 'support staff' should somehow work for free or minimal compensation because it's a charity. I would be curious to know how various posters expect these people to feed themselves and pay rent/ mortgages? IUsing the 'it's a charity' logic, should the flying staff also work for free? While I understand that the donating public should know how much of their donated money gets spent directly, around 50% is fairly good by charity standards. Feel free to look up the UN and large charities like Children in Need as a comparison. Fundamentally, if you want credible, qualified, full time and competent staff, you have to pay for that. What's the alternative? Pilot's doing the CEO job part time and engineers shaking buckets at the station on down time?
Using the London AA as the provided example, it's a 16m GBP revenue business and the top earners (likely medical director and CEO) are making 140k tops. That's a North Sea S-92 captain's salary. Running an organisation with 205 staff (including more than half who do work for free) is a very responsible job. I think 140k is actually quite low personally for that level of responsibility. I guarantee the Medical Director can earn significantly more in private practice or the NHS.
Read the financials at the end. Great insight: https://register-of-charities.charit...nNumber=801013
My 5c worth anyway.
I have no affinity or allegiance for or to any EMS operators, for profit or non profit, in the UK but I think there are several other ways of looking at these statistics and it's important to know exactly what is loaded into the 'admin' and what is loaded into the 'charitable activities' parts of these pie charts.
Some of these charities will load all their 'costs' into the admin, potentially including pilot and AME salaries, doctors. The 'money spent on charitable activities' could be direct flight costs only including fuel, landing fees, pbh etc. I'm not excusing anyone but I think it's important to have the full picture and realistic expectations as I doubt very much if the pie charts are as simple as 'office based' vs 'aircrew/ engineers'. I also doubt these stats are reported the same way by each charity.
Where I do take some issue with the comments made above is the rather odd insistence that somehow the 'support staff' should somehow work for free or minimal compensation because it's a charity. I would be curious to know how various posters expect these people to feed themselves and pay rent/ mortgages? IUsing the 'it's a charity' logic, should the flying staff also work for free? While I understand that the donating public should know how much of their donated money gets spent directly, around 50% is fairly good by charity standards. Feel free to look up the UN and large charities like Children in Need as a comparison. Fundamentally, if you want credible, qualified, full time and competent staff, you have to pay for that. What's the alternative? Pilot's doing the CEO job part time and engineers shaking buckets at the station on down time?
Using the London AA as the provided example, it's a 16m GBP revenue business and the top earners (likely medical director and CEO) are making 140k tops. That's a North Sea S-92 captain's salary. Running an organisation with 205 staff (including more than half who do work for free) is a very responsible job. I think 140k is actually quite low personally for that level of responsibility. I guarantee the Medical Director can earn significantly more in private practice or the NHS.
Read the financials at the end. Great insight: https://register-of-charities.charit...nNumber=801013
My 5c worth anyway.
Last edited by nowherespecial; 29th Mar 2024 at 05:51. Reason: Add link for London AA Financial Report.
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Let's not forget that some AA's in the UK make their pilots pay (or the pilots offer free working days) in exchange for LPC/OPCs, some (eg London) expect pilots to self-fund type ratings for just a summer of work.
Last edited by hargreaves99; 29th Mar 2024 at 09:21.
Caution, alternative take on the charity sector.
I have no affinity or allegiance for or to any EMS operators, for profit or non profit, in the UK but I think there are several other ways of looking at these statistics and it's important to know exactly what is loaded into the 'admin' and what is loaded into the 'charitable activities' parts of these pie charts.
Some of these charities will load all their 'costs' into the admin, potentially including pilot and AME salaries, doctors. The 'money spent on charitable activities' could be direct flight costs only including fuel, landing fees, pbh etc. I'm not excusing anyone but I think it's important to have the full picture and realistic expectations as I doubt very much if the pie charts are as simple as 'office based' vs 'aircrew/ engineers'. I also doubt these stats are reported the same way by each charity.
Where I do take some issue with the comments made above is the rather odd insistence that somehow the 'support staff' should somehow work for free or minimal compensation because it's a charity. I would be curious to know how various posters expect these people to feed themselves and pay rent/ mortgages? IUsing the 'it's a charity' logic, should the flying staff also work for free? While I understand that the donating public should know how much of their donated money gets spent directly, around 50% is fairly good by charity standards. Feel free to look up the UN and large charities like Children in Need as a comparison. Fundamentally, if you want credible, qualified, full time and competent staff, you have to pay for that. What's the alternative? Pilot's doing the CEO job part time and engineers shaking buckets at the station on down time?
Using the London AA as the provided example, it's a 16m GBP revenue business and the top earners (likely medical director and CEO) are making 140k tops. That's a North Sea S-92 captain's salary. Running an organisation with 205 staff (including more than half who do work for free) is a very responsible job. I think 140k is actually quite low personally for that level of responsibility. I guarantee the Medical Director can earn significantly more in private practice or the NHS.
My 5c worth anyway.
I have no affinity or allegiance for or to any EMS operators, for profit or non profit, in the UK but I think there are several other ways of looking at these statistics and it's important to know exactly what is loaded into the 'admin' and what is loaded into the 'charitable activities' parts of these pie charts.
Some of these charities will load all their 'costs' into the admin, potentially including pilot and AME salaries, doctors. The 'money spent on charitable activities' could be direct flight costs only including fuel, landing fees, pbh etc. I'm not excusing anyone but I think it's important to have the full picture and realistic expectations as I doubt very much if the pie charts are as simple as 'office based' vs 'aircrew/ engineers'. I also doubt these stats are reported the same way by each charity.
Where I do take some issue with the comments made above is the rather odd insistence that somehow the 'support staff' should somehow work for free or minimal compensation because it's a charity. I would be curious to know how various posters expect these people to feed themselves and pay rent/ mortgages? IUsing the 'it's a charity' logic, should the flying staff also work for free? While I understand that the donating public should know how much of their donated money gets spent directly, around 50% is fairly good by charity standards. Feel free to look up the UN and large charities like Children in Need as a comparison. Fundamentally, if you want credible, qualified, full time and competent staff, you have to pay for that. What's the alternative? Pilot's doing the CEO job part time and engineers shaking buckets at the station on down time?
Using the London AA as the provided example, it's a 16m GBP revenue business and the top earners (likely medical director and CEO) are making 140k tops. That's a North Sea S-92 captain's salary. Running an organisation with 205 staff (including more than half who do work for free) is a very responsible job. I think 140k is actually quite low personally for that level of responsibility. I guarantee the Medical Director can earn significantly more in private practice or the NHS.
My 5c worth anyway.
The cost to deliver one aircraft in those two organisations is roughly the same - £4 million per airframe.
I absolutely support the work of the delivery side of the Air Ambulance sector, but some of the shenanigans mentioned above about pilots paying for their own training and the appalling ineffectiveness of that one particular organsiation should be highlighted to the people making donations. It is a gross outlier across the sector (go ahead, check my working) and has been doing as badly for years (it only put 19% of it's expenditure into charitable activities one year).
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If they are paying the people who take no physical risks in their working day £140K, why aren't they paying the people in the aircraft who are exposed to constant risk more money?
Because it's all a massive gravy train for the people at the top, while the public get fleeced because they think a big shiny sexy thing is going to swoop down and save them, when in reality they are 100 times more likely to die from a stroke, heart attack or dementia than any lack of an Air Ambulance.
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I took Northernstar's link idea one stage further and had a quick look at another non-blue-light UK emergency service charity: the RNLI (Link here)
They managed to spend over 75% of their total for last year (£177.2m of £233m) on charitable expenditure, with just under 24% going toward fund-raising expenses. They had one person being paid £140k-150k and 2 earning £150k-200k. I know there is a huge element of apples vs pears here (lower crew costs for starters; I shouldn't think the RNLI has any need for a medical director, and aircraft maint is possibly in a different order of magnitude compared to boats), but I think the RNLI model is one the many disparate Air Ambos could learn from. Just keep Gov't money out of it - we would never want to see another farce like the National Police Air "Service" debacle, would we?
Am now going to have a ferret around a charity using the name (County Air Ambulance) previously carried by the Midlands Air Ambulance, to see what they actually do with their income. Fascinating stuff - thanks again, Northernstar
They managed to spend over 75% of their total for last year (£177.2m of £233m) on charitable expenditure, with just under 24% going toward fund-raising expenses. They had one person being paid £140k-150k and 2 earning £150k-200k. I know there is a huge element of apples vs pears here (lower crew costs for starters; I shouldn't think the RNLI has any need for a medical director, and aircraft maint is possibly in a different order of magnitude compared to boats), but I think the RNLI model is one the many disparate Air Ambos could learn from. Just keep Gov't money out of it - we would never want to see another farce like the National Police Air "Service" debacle, would we?
Am now going to have a ferret around a charity using the name (County Air Ambulance) previously carried by the Midlands Air Ambulance, to see what they actually do with their income. Fascinating stuff - thanks again, Northernstar
Because it's all a massive gravy train for the people at the top, while the public get fleeced because they think a big shiny sexy thing is going to swoop down and save them, when in reality they are 100 times more likely to die from a stroke, heart attack or dementia than any lack of an Air Ambulance.
Most of the income for the charity I was involved in came from their lottery. Most people's perspective was that £1 a week was a small sum to pay for supporting a service that anyone could need at any time. The secret is to get enough people to sign up, of course.
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To add some perspective, the Trustees are all well meaning, unpaid volunteers, trying to support the charities, however they are hampered by what they are told, or not told, of the day to day workings. The information they are fed comes from the CEO with no analysis from the Trustees, except occasional meetings with a diluted snap shot of the state of things in general terms.
The Trustess are completely reliant on information for their deliberations and decisions from the CEO, so the conflict of interest will always exist as Trustess are asked to make decisions given part facts depending on how they need to be guided to get to the right decision
The Trustess are completely reliant on information for their deliberations and decisions from the CEO, so the conflict of interest will always exist as Trustess are asked to make decisions given part facts depending on how they need to be guided to get to the right decision
Jock - the question was:-
"on what metric these trustees measure value? "
I don't think that was vague or shrouded in anything!
What seems slightly odd on first look is that you have an association and yet there are obviously big gaps between the organisations, yet this isn't a new field of operation.
"on what metric these trustees measure value? "
I don't think that was vague or shrouded in anything!
What seems slightly odd on first look is that you have an association and yet there are obviously big gaps between the organisations, yet this isn't a new field of operation.
At least one southern charity allowed a trustee get a job with the service provider. Not sure being a trustee is so far removed all the time. That's just one easy example to search for online.