East Anglia's first female flying doctor Pam Chrispin's happy landing into retirement
When Pam Chrispin became East Anglia’s first female flying doctor, she soon found getting to a casualty could sometimes be almost as dramatic as the emergency itself.
On her second mission with the region’s air ambulance, the helicopter touched down on a reed bed and immediately began to sink.
“We had to jump out fast and it had to take off again sharpish,” says Pam, who has just retired as deputy medical director of the East Anglian Air Ambulance (EAAA).
“There are occasional scary moments. But the helicopter is a very safe form of travel – it’s more hazardous driving to work.”
“Another time, we landed on a tow path really close to the water and getting out was quite tricky.
“Then, we were on the wrong side of the river, so had to get a boat, which then sprung a leak and started to sink.
“We’ve also had to do an emergency landing in a field because of a really bad thunderstorm.”
Her career with the EAAA has seen some heart-in-mouth moments, trauma, joy and tragedy. Some of the best times have been reunions with patients who owe her their lives.
“There have also been a lot of very sad jobs, where you turn up and can’t do anything at all,” she said. “My first mission was to a man who had died of carbon monoxide poisoning – he’d killed himself.”
Pam began volunteering for the service in 2007, proving that a small, middle-aged woman in glasses (her words) could do the job as well as any man.
She carried on flying life-saving missions until 2021, fitting in her shifts with a distinguished career that included being a consultant and, for a time, medical director at West Suffolk Hospital.
But it took her a while to realise she was a trailblazer. “To be honest, it didn’t even cross my mind for years that I was their first female doctor,” she said.
“They already had a female paramedic – now it’s almost half and half.
“I got into it because I was a volunteer with Suffolk Accident Rescue Service, which is a wonderful service ... I was its chairman for some time.”
Pam said her final goodbye at the end of January. As a parting gift, her colleagues organised a treasure hunt where, at every stop, she found people she had worked with, or patients whose lives she had saved.
They included Emma Cavanagh and her daughter, Willow, who is now three. Pam had arrived at their home to find a life-or-death situation where every second was critical.
Emma had suffered a placental abruption – a desperately serious problem that, without Pam’s help, could have killed her and her unborn baby.
Also waiting to meet her were nine year-old Tilly and her mum, Hayley. Pam saved Tilly’s life when she had a severe asthma attack four years ago.
It was an emotional day. “By the time we got back, I could barely speak,” she said.
She also recalls a young man who had accidentally taken an opiate overdose. “He’d had terrible pain, and taken quite a lot,” she recalls.
“We arrived soon after he had stopped breathing; he was blue and his heart wasn’t beating. We were not expecting that.
“We got ourselves organised and managed to work out what had happened and were able to reverse the opiates. He was awake when we got into the ambulance and he made a really good recovery.
“You only need the occasional thing like that to make you feel it’s all worthwhile.”
When Pam started with the EAAA, a second helicopter, Cambridge-based Anglia Two, had just joined Anglia One, which flew from Norwich Airport.
“There was a crew room, a charity office and a storeroom, which doubled up as a changing room,” she recalls. “The blokes were quite decent about not coming in while I was getting changed.
“It was all very ad-hoc in the beginning, squeezing stuff in around the day job. But using volunteers wasn’t really the best way of supporting people coming in who required structure, training and supervision.”
The life-saving charity can now call on around 60 doctors and 12 critical care paramedics, plus a back-up pool – all of whom get paid – covering four shifts a day and also flying at night.
“It’s a £15-million-a-year operation,” said Pam. “A lot has changed in the last 14 years; the service is now highly professional and the care we can deliver pre-hospital is simply amazing.
“The EAAA has moved on from being a rapid way of taking people to hospital to bringing the hospital to them.
“We have wonderful critical care paramedics who have been around for a long time and are so good at working in that hazardous environment. Doctors have other skills and it’s a great combination.”
“Many of our pilots are ex-combat pilots. They are awesome – the way they can fly.
“It’s a beautiful air ambulance, the one we have now. When I started, there was a pilot and paramedic in the front and a doctor in the back.
“If they were transporting a patient, they could only get to their head. You couldn’t defibrilate. Now you can work all around them.
For a couple of years, there was one member of the team who was, shall we say, a bit more famous than the others. Prince William, who had flown helicopters with the RAF, joined the EAAA in 2015.
“William was brilliant – he was a normal pilot,” says Pam. “I was also lucky enough to show the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh around the helicopter when they visited the Cambridge base.
“The Queen was just amazing to talk to, and the Duke was hilarious, so funny and telling these anecdotes about when he used to fly helicopters.”
The air ambulance passed its 20-year milestone in the midst of the pandemic. “The anniversary celebration got binned because of Covid,” said Pam. “I still have a ballgown in my wardrobe for the celebration ball that I haven’t worn.”
Much as she will miss everyone at the EAAA, she feels now is the right time to leave.
“It’s been a huge privilege for me personally to be able to help train the next generation of pre-hospital emergency medicine specialists and to see them leap-frogging me in terms of their skills, drive and ambition to continuously improve patient care,” she says.
“It’s been wonderful and I am feeling very emotional about leaving. I will miss everyone dearly but am looking forward to spending more time with my family.
“Retiring feels okay. It was very much my choice. I had to have a period of shielding at the start of Covid so I didn’t fly for six months, and that felt like unfinished business.
“I had a really bad bout of pneumonia in 2019, which I think may have been early Covid. We had been to Madrid for the Davis Cup – we are really big tennis fans – and mixed with loads of people from different countries.
“My chest was rubbish afterwards and it took me time to get over it.
“I found it very hard to watch my colleagues put themselves in harm’s way day after day. I would have gone back to help in ITC in Bury but I couldn’t.”
Instead, she took on the task of setting up a critical transfer desk for NHS England, organising the safe transfer of Covid patients between ICUs.
“That made me feel like I was helping,” she says. “I did that for about three months, then again in the second wave.
“We now have a dedicated critical care transfer service in the east to move very sick patients around.
“I only stopped flying at the end of February 2021. It’s physically hard work and there is a lot of running around, carrying heavy equipment and patients.
“We did 12-hour shifts so, for me, it was all getting quite hard in my 60s. We have lots of brilliant young people who can do it instead.”
Liverpool-born Pam knew she wanted to be a doctor from the age of nine. “My family weren’t particularly well off, but I had the benefit of good schools,” she says.
“I was quite an ill and sickly little baby, so I had quite a lot to do with doctors, and people who looked after me. I always wanted to be a hospital doctor.
“The entire world and his wife wanted to put me off – apart from my parents, who were brilliant.
“The percentage intake of women was quite low. At that time, only one in 20 who applied got in. I was told it was really difficult.
“Then we had a doctor come into school when I was about 14 to do jabs, and she asked what I wanted to do. I said I wanted to be a doctor, and she said ‘that’s brilliant, go for it’. I was the first person in my family to go to university.
She trained at St Bartholomew’s in London. “It was a massive change to go down to the big city in 1977. I was desperate to go back to Liverpool as we are all huge Liverpool FC supporters.”
Pam’s medical career spans 40 years and includes house jobs in A&E and medicine, anaesthetic training at West Suffolk Hospital, and registrar posts in Manchester, Norwich, Ipswich, Addenbrooke’s and Papworth.
“I finished up as an anaesthetics and intensive care consultant at West Suffolk – a really happy 15 years,” she says.
She has also been medical director of West Suffolk, and of the East of England Ambulance Service.
“I think the thing I’m most proud of in my career is that we set up the first critical care follow-up unit at West Suffolk Hospital,” she says.
“Supporting patients through that post-critical care phase is probably the thing I’m most proud of.
“Basically, we found a clinic that wasn’t being used on Tuesday mornings and moved in.”
The clinic helped people with things like pain, physio and nutrition. “It was just unknown back then,” said Pam.
“One of the things we found out was that one of the fluids we had been using was causing uncontrollable itching.”
Pam and her husband, Wayne, who live in Roydon, were married in 2005. He is a self-employed gardener, who used to work at Blooms of Bressingham.
“We got together at a Sunday school picnic in around 1997,” she says. “We have five grandchildren between us and do quite a lot of looking after them. They’re all in Norfolk. We love being an active part of their lives.
“Wayne is my complete rock. I couldn’t have done any of it without him. “He jokes he has got used to living with greatness and he’s glad he won’t have to any more.
“When we married, I was a runner and he was a cyclist. I ran the Paris Marathon in 1998, and the London Marathon in 1999 and 2002.
“We took up each other’s sports, then he became a better runner and I became a better cyclist. We are very competitive about everything.”
In retirement, Pam will carry on her role as a non-executive director at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, and will work as an executive coach.
