Driven by a desire to help save young lives, three/four teams of swimmers will attempt to complete one of the most gruelling feats of human endeavour when they swim the English Channel in aid of the Childrens Air Ambulance.Nearly 146 years after Captain Matthew Webb became the first person to complete the swim from Dover to Calais, three/four teams of six will navigate the 22.5-mile stretch as a relay in an effort to raise vital funds for the national lifesaving charity.The swimmers will become part of a worldwide family of people who have conquered the famed stretch of water, home to the worlds busiest shipping lanes, but more than that they will help to keep families together through supporting the critical work of the Childrens Air Ambulance.

As a consultant in Paediatric Intensive Care in Leicester I have worked with TCAA for several years. I was involved in the interior and stretcher design for the AW169, and use this amazing service to transport poorly children long distances to and from our intensive care unit. More recently we have worked together to develop an addition to the stretcher that will allow us to move critically ill children on ECMO (Extra Corporeal Life Support) a form of temporary heart and lung bypass, which gives critically ill children all over the UK the ability be placed on ECMO and/or moved to specialist ECMO units in a safe and timely manner

On a personal level, I started my swimming journey just 3 years ago, when I couldn't swim 25m front crawl, yet signed up for the swim leg of an olympic distance triathlon. My fellow Dr and the medics teammate's, and work colleagues, Tab and Simon, got me in the pool, then the open water and 3 months later I swam the 1.5k. Since then I haven't looked back and open water swimming is one of my favourite things to do. Living so far from the sea, this seemed like an amazing opportunity to broaden my swim horizons, get over my fear of jellyfish and do something truly exciting for a wonderful cause.