PARAMEDICS will remain airborne in the year ahead after the Government agreed to provide £239,000 towards the costs of the North West Air Ambulance.

Since it began in 1999, the air ambulance has been called out more than 2,000 times in the region, including numerous visits to Cumbrian towns and villages and to the Lake District fells.

But a three-year funding package from the Automobile Association, which met most of the costs since start-up, comes to an end this year leaving the £900,000-a-year emergency service with a funding gap.

The North West Air Ambulance, which last week landed at K Village following an accident on Lound Road and last year airlifted teenage pedestrian Holly Semple to hospital when she was injured in a road accident on Milnthorpe Road, serves a population of some seven million across Cumbria, Lancashire, Cheshire, Merseyside and Greater Manchester.

Announcing the North West's share of the £ 2.2million to be delivered through the NHS - the first Government cash to be spent on air ambulance services in Britain - Health Minister Hazel Blears said the money would ensure that "air ambulance charities who are not yet in a position to meet their full running costs are supported until they have funding from other public and corporate sources."

David Hill, chairman of the North West Air Ambulance, welcomed news of the government funding.

"It is tremendous news, it will allow us to keep flying, but we need to look forward," he said.

"It is a continuing huge effort to find the funds and we have been extremely grateful over the last three years to all the generosity we have had from the public," he told the Gazette.

" We are now raising half of the £900,000 through general fund-raising but there is still a long way to go."

He also said the NHS in the region was expected to agree to meet the £125,000 staffing cost for the paramedics on the air ambulance.

But with the end of the AA deal and only short-term help from the Government, Mr Hill said the public' s role in fund-raising would be "absolutely essential" over the next 12 months and further into the future.

The Bolkow 105 helicopter used as the North West Air Ambulance is currently dressed in the yellow and black livery of the AA.

Mr Hill said that, with the end of the AA's nationwide funding deal worth £14 million over the last three years, that livery would now be under review and hoped a new corporate sponsor for the service would be found.

l Anyone who would like to help with fundraising for the North West Air Ambulance service should call Lynda Brislin or Jackie Northover on 0151-527-2511 or on mobile 07789-938832.