A joint fundraiser at Cross Ash village hall raised over £1,200 to be split between the village hall and the Welsh Air Ambulance.

The evening revolved around World Record Holder and Environmental Champion Kiko Matthews who gave a talk and showed a film on her journey through life.

Kiko, who broke the record for solo rowing across the Atlantic from Gran Canaria to Barbados after brain surgery in 2017, attracted around 86 people to hear her tale of success following her diagnosis in 2009 with Cushings Disease, a rare and life-threatening condition which causes tumours on the pituitary gland - the gland that controls the body's hormone production.

£660.50 was raised for both the hall and the air ambulance and a cheque was presented to the volunteer Welsh Air Ambulance representatives Angela Jones and Robert Evans from committee members Kirsty Close, Juliet Morgan and Diane Odling-Smee.

Air Ambulance volunteer representative Angela told the Beacon that the current annual funding requirement for the service is around £12m

“Although the service does emergency retrieval, it is intensive care at the site too, we have consultants from principal care and the ambulance and then we have critical care practitioners who are enhanced paramedics.”

Angela, a former intensive-care nurse herself added they have two nurses for all of Wales “who do follow-up bereavement support and when people have been unconscious and had treatment, part of the recovery and the therapy is understanding what happened to you and how you got better because you're unconscious are people can lose days, even weeks of their lives and these nurses then will go through the treatment to what they had and how the ended up in hospital what happened as a way of helping them psychologically recover from what is a huge traumatic event so it's really quite a bit more in than just landing a helicopter.”

The air ambulance also do paediatric (infant or child) transfers as well to get patients to the paediatric centres so they carry neonates ( a child under 28 days of age) as well as paediatrics.”

Money well spent then Cross Ash!