Parents' 'disastrous date' ends in baby airlift

Olivia Brummitt and Dan Atkinson met the team who saved their baby girl's life

A mother has described how a meal out after leaving her baby overnight for the first time became a "disastrous date" when the infant needed airlifting to hospital.

Olivia Brummitt and Dan Atkinson left their two children, aged 11 months and six years, with their parents in Brough to go for a meal in Carlisle.

Olivia said the pair had "literally just finished dinner" when they got a call from Dan's dad saying that their baby daughter Winnie was having seizures and her eyes were rolling back.

The Great North Air Ambulance Service (GNAAS) flew Winnie to Middlesbrough's James Cook University Hospital for vital treatment.

"It was the stuff of nightmares... we could hear our other daughter Ada crying and her nana was having to do CPR," Olivia said.

"Winnie was playing happily at her grandparents house when she went completely vacant and then she started shaking and her eyes rolled back."

An ambulance reached Winnie within 45 minutes, but her mother "did not realise how serious it was until the air ambulance was called".

"We were totally powerless and we couldn't help think that the worst would happen."

Winnie spent a few days recovering at Middlesbrough's James Cook University Hospital

Winnie, who is now aged 13 months, was put into an induced coma and stabilised.

She was discharged from hospital last month and is awaiting results from an electroencephalogram.

"GNAAS saved her life," Olivia said. "The same journey by road would have been more than an hour."

GNAAS said it needed to raise £2.5m for a deposit for a third helicopter

It comes as the service has warned it may need to scale back its operations unless it can raise enough money to prop up its ageing fleet.

GNAAS currently has two helicopters which respond to more than 2,000 critically ill or injured people in north-east England, Cumbria, North Yorkshire and the Isle of Man.

The charity said it needed to raise £2.5m for a deposit for a third helicopter as its current fleet was coming to the end of its "economically viable life".