And Steve, you're a bit different from some of the people we've had on the podcast. We've had researchers and inventors and people like that. Tell us a bit about you and what you do for a living.

And we all tend to find our field of interest is most and probably the trauma side of life is very much the part that interests me most.

And, you know, the pre-hospital setting is by no means any exception. We do a lot of essentially 1-1-1 work, sort of referral work for anything from a hurting knee, a sore throat to a much more severe, complicated end of the scale. But generally, if we're focussing on trauma alone, you never know what the next thing that's going to come flashing through the front of your ambulance will be.

So, for example, you know, we have a big road, big dual carriageway, A14, and something happens on there. You see the address, so you think, oh, that's a potential to be quite nasty, quite high speed, high velocity. And you get there and it's nothing.

Or it's the other end of the scale where you get nothing at all. And you go along thinking, oh, this is a 30 mile an hour road, nothing possibly could happen here. And it's the end of the world.

So, yeah, it can be really hard to tell what you're going to.

So they have your typical double staff ambulance, which could be anything from a clinical grade of emergency care assistant, emergency medical technician up to a paramedic and then or a combination of all. And then if things are kind of above and beyond what we have in the back of the truck and where extra interventions needed, then typically the helicopter charities will start to get involved. Sometimes they self-mobilise, sometimes we request them.

And then you have a pre-hospital consultant normally and critical care paramedics who have had extra training can do extra things. But yeah, it really depends on the patient and other factors, too. Like sometimes hanging about when we're five minutes away from a hospital where we could get them blood and get them trauma surgeons and all the rest of it, it is a case of run away almost.

There's a saying of treating a patient with diesel, they actually just get in them somewhere quickly. And then other times, especially where I work, we're so rural, the fact is the person wouldn't survive the journey if we didn't do lots of stuff first. And, you know, when you get a helicopter team there, you essentially have an anaesthetist, you essentially have all different ways of artificially keeping that person alive and getting them to hospital.

I'm in Norfolk, you're in Suffolk. After my accident, I went in a helicopter actually, but all the way to Cambridge. And I'm guessing you might have to transport quite a lot of these seriously injured patients really quite a long distance.

So we can do that as well at the roadside. But yeah, so if we use the trauma network, so we have a tool, the major trauma tool to kind of decide if we're going to bypass the local hospitals and go straight to, Addenbrookes is the one for our region. The more into Essex you get, you sort of start heading to London.

And yeah, obviously with a helicopter, you do have the advantage of sometimes being able to fly. But it really does depend on the extent of the injuries, because if that person deteriorates in mid-air, it's a lot harder to manage. As well as sometimes, so brain injury being one of them, most helicopter technicians will probably choose to travel by road. And anecdotally anyway, the majority of severe head injuries that I've been involved with will normally travel by road.

He was showing lots of clinical signs of a worsening head injury, but because of the fall down the stairs, we also had to protect his spine. And currently, that means laying someone flat on a scoop stretcher or a trauma board. Which, when you lay someone flat with a severe head injury, you increase that pressure in their brain and potentially they get a secondary brain injury, which can have really lasting impacts on their recovery and future.

But it's a horrible position, paramedics and pre-hospital clinicians get put in a lot where you basically have to choose between potential paralysis from a spinal injury or potential lifelong disability or worse from a worsening head injury. So, like I said, it was literally me and my friend sitting in the front of a cab being like, there's got to be a better way, you know, almost like a beer garden talk of how I'm going to try and fix the world. And, yeah, so I essentially started literal fag packet type designing and decided to take it a bit further.

And here I am two years later trying to learn a whole new world of tech.

They'll put the patient's head up to 30 degrees, sometimes 45 to help with that gravity and that drainage to keep that swelling off the brain, as well as drugs and other interventions. But so today, pre-hospital, it's one of those areas where all our guidelines say we should do one thing, but it's impossible to do. So I guess I'm trying to create a bit of technology to bridge that gap.

Yes. It is simple, but simple is good for pre-hospital.

I'm lying on a stiff scoop stretcher, laid up flat. You've got to get me in the back of the bus and take me off potentially quite a long way to hospital. And at the moment, that scoop is just going to sort of slide in on a trolley into the back of the ambulance.

So how are you going to try and raise my head? Do you lift the whole stretcher up?

And also, it only achieves a few degrees, which is better than nothing, but it's not therapeutic really. So what I'm trying to create is looking at an inflatable device that goes between the bed and the scoop stretcher so that straight spinal alignment is still maintained. But essentially, like a triangle wedge, we'll inflate one end, the head end, to provide a therapeutic angle.

It won't be the full 30 degrees because that wouldn't be safe. But hopefully, again, with bench testing going on, hopefully getting sort of 15 to 20 degrees.

Are people trying out prototypes already?

But in terms of timeline, it's always really difficult. So to present, I've kind of funded this all myself. So the next phase for me is definitely to try and share some of that sort of financial element.

So I am looking at grants and potentially investors and all that kind of thing. Which, by and large, everyone's really keen. And the story sells itself.

I'm quite lucky in that sense that there is an appetite for it. But yeah, timelines are difficult because obviously it's got regulatory approval that needs to go through and all that stuff. But I'm really hoping within the next year / 18 months, I would have made significant steps towards at least having it used on a really small trial.

And then hopefully it'll grow arms and legs and adoption from there.

You are the people who work on that. And I imagine you must have had innovations come along in the past. Just say, I'll stick this on your ambulance and use it.

And you're like, well, it doesn't fit in with the way we work.

Yeah, it's definitely, I don't want it to be one of those innovations that is great in principle, but actually real world doesn't do what it says on the tin.

So thanks ever so much, Steve, for finding the time to have a chat. If you've enjoyed the podcast, do check out other ones in the series. There are loads and loads of interesting stories for you to catch up and listen to.

Thanks very much.