Community First Responders.

There is a national scheme run by the Ambulance Service that sends a local volunteer with a pack of emergency equipment to a casualty where it seems likely that an ambulance could be delayed. The volunteer is then able to significantly improve the casualty’s chances of survival and quality of recovery. The volunteer is trained in the use of the equipment which includes oxygen, an automatic electronic defibrillator and basic first aid. This is not instead of the ambulance, that is already on its way.

With Grove Hill and Chapel Hill congestion in mind (set to get a lot worse yet) we need this in the village, I am keen to help set it up but am way too busy to run it so we need two kinds of volunteers. Firstly volunteers to be responders and secondly volunteers to support them with fundraising etc plus somebody to coordinate the lot as this will be independent of the Parish Council. (see November minutes in archive)

No special skills are required and the first meeting will be only to hear an expert explain it all properly. Contact Geof 01279 812702 or e-mail (see below)

My work on the Village Emergency Planning results in me attending the periodic meetings of the coordinating body and the last such introduced a new overall coordinator for Uttlesford District Council, Lisa Lipscombe. Lisa introduced the idea of Community First Responders giving a brief outline of what they do along with words to the effect that across the Country many lives had been saved by prompt assistance. Lisa also said that the take-up across Essex was building up and she was keen to see Parishes like ours taking it on.

I was given a contact within the Ambulance Service, himself a Paramedic who was the local coordinator for the scheme itself who told me a lot more. I was thus convinced and went onto the Internet to get more information and found thousands of sites of groups running local First Responder Teams. I plundered those sites for information and put together a package which I then presented to the Parish Council. I tabled a motion for the Parish Council to set up and support a First Responder group but the motion was defeated by a faction convinced that amateur volunteers with powerful medical equipment were liable to do more harm than good.

I did try to explain that the key equipment, the defibrillator was far removed from the hospital kit seen on the TV. Used wrongly, hospital kit can kill. This equipment embodies a computer with very advanced software and includes a heart monitor. If the heart monitor determines that the victim is in fact dead or has some other form of heart problem and is not in ventricular fibrillation then the system will not fire. It is in fact as near to fool-proof that modern technology can achieve.

This AED, Automatic Electronic Defibrillator is now in use by the thousand across the country. Our local Airport for example has no less that 28 of them and all their First Aiders are trained to use them.

Basic training takes four days typically done as two weekends and includes the Oxygen set and some basic first aid. It has to be emphasised that the First responder is just that, the Ambulance or Paramedic is already on its way but in rural areas will take a while. The typical scenario then is that by being local and arriving on scene very quickly, lives are saved or lost precisely in those few minutes. Also when the casualty survives the long term outcome can be drastically improved by the help received during those critical few minutes.

Around the Country lack of support from the Local Parish Council is not unusual, medical people especially the more elderly ones are well known to jealously guard their prerogatives and have successfully blocked the establishment of first responder groups often in the past but now, increasingly, groups are starting up as independent organisations within those communities. The problem of course is finance, these kits are not free and not cheap. A rough estimate for a full kit is £2,500 and then there will be on-going costs which will amount to around 10% per year. Damage is also a possibility so some contingencies need to be put in place.

In Elsenham we have a very good Group Practice Surgery but in common with NHS GP facilities everywhere it has set hours and outside those hours the Emergency Doctor Service kicks in. Few if any of the Surgery staff are resident in the village nor is the emergency doctor based here. Out of hours or at weekends then, everything has to come in by road and we all know what local congestion can be like.

Speaking purely for myself, if I find myself down to my last few minutes I am going to grab at any chance and I wont even care if I live or die by the operation of a computer because without that chance I’m gone anyway! My biggest terror however is to survive but in such a damaged state that my life and that of those around me is ruined and its possible that a prompt trained response could prevent that and I will be truly grateful whoever did it.

This is the summary presented to the Council.

I now have enough people interested to form a basic front line team, I even have somebody thinking about taking on the overall coordination of it all but what I am short of is a support team. I would have liked to have done it myself but over the years I have taken on way too much.

The kit needs buying up front and then there are consumables and wear and tear, essential maintenance plus on-going recruitment as people come and go following their private lives and careers.

At this stage there is nothing to sign up to we are building up to calling a meeting at which speakers will present the whole scheme and answer questions. If enough people then do decide to sign up, then the real work starts.