Community First RespondersCommunity First Responders are a voluntary part of the South-Central Ambulance Service and are local people trained to provide basic life support care until the arrival of an ambulance. We carry oxygen and a defibrillator as well as other medical equipment. Your Wraysbury responders both respond from home. We are Andy Bouch at Sunnymeads and Jan Coates in the village centre.

We operate independently of each other, logging in as on call and at standby when we have a few either free or interruptible hours. Jan logs on more often in the evenings and Andy usually during daytime. We had a chat at Karrellies in September and might mix this up a bit.

The number of calls varies enormously; during September I’ve done five days with no incidents and on a single day, logged in for seven and a half hours responded at four incidents. By the time you leave the house (within 2 minutes of the alert), drive to the incident, manage the incident and hand over to the crew, often staying to help them, clear scene and drive home a call can take from an hour to three hours. You don’t get much else done on the busiest days!

There are also several incidents where we are stood down on the way to the incident, either an ambulance has arrived and does not require further assistance or because the patient has got up and left the scene. It does happen!

We might also get called to concern for welfare calls, typically an older or vulnerable patient who has triggered a personal alarm, a carer who has found their charge having fallen over or calls initiated by concerned relatives. In these cases, we do medical observations and discuss the patient’s health then defer to an Ambulance Service Clinical Support Desk before helping the patient and then, on advice, either triggering an ambulance, transferring the case to a clinician for example GP or district nurse or clearing the call.

People ask me “is it fun?” The answer is “no, but it is. interesting”.

Jan and Andy are your Wraysbury First Responders and we work with Frank Epstein, the Windsor area CFR co-ordinator. As always we hope not to see you soon unless you want to talk to us about becoming a local Community First Responder in which case email me,

Andy Bouch [email protected]

or Frank [email protected].