Six Thanet Community First Responders received awards last weekend, recognising their life saving resuscitation successes over the past 12 months.
Community First Responders (CFRs) are volunteers; trained, equipped and dispatched to 999 emergency calls by the ambulance service.
Thanet has 17 active CFRs, supporting emergency ambulance crews. Across the South East Coast Ambulance Service Trust, CFRs responded to over 20,000 emergency calls last year.
Reaching patients in a timely way can make a huge difference to outcomes. In cases where a CFR was first on scene, response times were on average 4 minutes and 13 seconds before the ambulance.
Beverley-Jayne, Tim, Heather, Keiron, Simon and Maxine (who has been a CFR for less than 6 months) have all achieved a ROSC (return to spontaneous circulation), through high quality resuscitation in the past year.
In total they succeeded in bringing back nine patients, two of which were achieved just through CPR. The timely intervention from first responders gave them every possible chance of survival.
CFRs have made a huge difference in heart attack, stroke, catastrophic bleeding and anaphylactic shock to name just a few of the incidents they regularly attend.
Team leader Jesper Lorenzen said: “I am so proud of the whole team. They are literally life-savers. These results show the importance of learning and being able to perform high quality CPR. The person you are most likely to perform CPR on is a member of your own family.”
The challenging but rewarding role can also lead to a full-time career with the ambulance service.
