Less than two weeks after launching their fundraising appeal for war trauma kits, Festival Medical Services volunteers have sent the first batch to Ukraine and upped their cash target to £20,000.

Volunteers from the Mendip-based charity were originally collecting £15,000 to pay for boxes of hospital-grade items to treat people with war injuries, such as embedded shrapnel, severe bleeding and blocked airways.

But after only 10 days, they had already raised £12,000 from kind-hearted members of the public who had heard their appeal via the media or spotted it on their social media and online charity pages.

This enabled them to pack up the first 12 trauma boxes at their headquarters in Evercreech and then drive them to Manchester to be loaded on lorries driving to Poland, where they will be met by charity representatives able to drive on to Kyiv, from where they'll be distributed to the medics desperate to receive them in their now mostly underground hospital facilities.

FMS is a charity whose doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals, together with support staff, are best-known for volunteering at music festivals, such as Glastonbury and Reading, and other high-profile outdoor events.

There they offer full on-site emergency medical services for fans, plus other healthcare services such as dentistry, podiatry, physiotherapy and mental healthcare.

FMS founder and Managing Director, Dr Chris Howes, from Croscombe, near Wells, said that following this, they decided to raise their target to £20,000 to enable them to send a second batch of trauma boxes as soon as possible.

He said: "We are extremely grateful to everyone who has sent us a donation over the past two weeks – they can be assured that all their money has gone towards the purchase of this equipment – which we know medical and nursing colleagues in Ukraine are asking for and will use.

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"Obviously, it will get used up quickly, so we have decided to continue fundraising at least another £5,000 to enable us to gather together and send off a second batch of boxes as soon as we can

"We hope people will continue to help us by visiting our fundraising page https://www.totalgiving.co.uk/appeal/Medical_Boxes_Ukraine and giving what they can."

Dr Howes said if there was ultimately any surplus money, it would be used for further medical provision in Ukraine and for helping refugees in surrounding countries.

FMS celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2019 and in 2020 was honoured with the Queen's Award for Voluntary Service - the highest award a voluntary group can receive in the UK. It has raised more than £1m for small-scale medical projects in the UK and around the world through its own fund-raising in that time.