Drones soar through London delivering NHS blood

If you knew where to look in the skies above London last month, you’d have seen history in the making.

For the first time, drones were being flown Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) in the heart of the city and inside them, a precious payload of urgent blood samples for the NHS.

These flights – which are still on-going – form part of London Health Bridge, a pioneering project set to transform healthcare logistics. The first flight took off on 7 October, shuttling between Guy’s Hospital Cancer Centre and the lab at St Thomas’ Hospital.

While only a short distance as the crow flies, it’s a journey that, when done by road and after negotiating central London traffic, can take over half an hour. With a drone that’s been cut to less than two minutes. Not only does this enable quicker blood sample analysis, helping to determine whether patients are safe to undergo surgery or be discharged, it’s also far more environmentally friendly. The very quiet, lightweight and electric commercial drones the team are using are 99% more efficient in terms of carbon emissions than a petrol car.

Images courtesy of Wing

The masterminds behind it all are a consortium of healthcare, drone and logistical experts. Alongside Guy’s and St Thomas’ is Apian, a healthcare logistics company founded by NHS doctors (and boasts NATS alumni, Louisa Smith as its Chief Aviation Officer), and Wing, the global last mile drone delivery company that’s part of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

When the project was announced, Dr Hammad Jeilani, Co-Founder of Apian, said: “Drones can increase the responsiveness and resilience of healthcare logistics, allowing clinicians to be more productive and patients to get the care they need sooner. An NHS drone delivery network in London, starting with this innovative trial, will provide on-demand, automated and sustainable deliveries, helping the NHS create more efficient models of working and our doctors and nurses to deliver the highest quality care for patients.”

For us, London Health Bridge is one of the most exciting drone projects happening anywhere in the world. That’s not just because of the benefits to patients and the NHS, but because it’s happening in the heart of a busy metropolis in some of the most complex airspace in the world.

The six-month operation that’s been approved by the CAA is making use an airspace construct called a Temporary Reserved Area. Typically, BVLOS drone operations in the UK have had to happen in what’s called a Temporary Danger Area. This is the same airspace designation that gets used when RAF jets are on manoeuvres and effectively sterilises a piece of sky and closes it to other users. That’s done for safety reasons, but it’s not a scalable solution if we want to see drones routinely delivering the kinds of services Apian are pioneering here.

The use of a Temporary Reserved Area for drone operations, which allows drones and conventional aircraft to safely share the air, is seen as a stepping stone towards greater integration so that these kinds of flights will no longer be the exception.

We spoke to Louisa Smith, Apian’s Chief Aviation Officer and Wing’s Matt Satterley at DroneX in September

From a NATS perspective, we’ve been working with Apian for a number of years to help make this trial happen. With no drones operating above 400ft, they’re extremely unlikely to interact with any commercial air traffic, but we did need to think carefully about how an emergency service aircraft would be able to access the area quickly if required.

With five months of the trial still to run, I’m excited to see what progress the team makes. I’m sure there will be much to learn, but it’s another step towards a more integrated airspace in the UK.

And if you find yourself in that part of London, make sure you look up.