Horsham and Southwater Community First Responders

DotNetWebs — Wed, 02 May 2007 01:35:56 GMT

Horsham and Southwater Community First Responders

Your Chance of survival drops by up to 23% for EVERY MINUTE that passes when your heart has stopped beating.

First Responders are community based volunteers in Horsham activated by the South East Coast Ambulance Service to provide early intervention for a number of critical medical conditions such as sudden death, chest pain, unconsciousness and breathing difficulties. We hope to have a scheme operational in Horsham in the next few weeks.

Getting help as quickly as possible to a patient suffering a cardiac arrest increases the patient’s chance of survival by around 40%, South East Coast Ambulance Service (SECAmb) has a government target of eight minutes to reach these kinds of medical emergencies but in the event of this type of collapse, even that is too long.

Training is provided by SECAmb and the members of the schemes are supported and dispatched in the same way as an ambulance. Volunteers are never sent instead of an ambulance, but do often arrive beforehand and provide the vital links in the chain of survival for these time critical medical emergencies.

Each Community First Responder kits costs £1,800 which includes an AED (Automated External Defibrillator.) an AED if used within the first 4-5 minutes of cardiac arrest, can greatly increase the patients chance of survival.

South East Coast Ambulance Service do not provide funding for all of the equipment, but they do provide the training & support to the volunteers.

Therefore, we are constantly looking for funds from local businesses, organisations and people, to allow us to expand and replace our range of equipment and to keep us operational. All our team give up their time to train, be on call and deal with all the other administration tasks as volunteers, and receive no payment or expenses such as fuel costs at all.

If you would like to make a donation to the Horsham & Southwater Community First Responder Scheme, you can donate online at http://www.horshamresponders.org.uk. Alternatively, there is a postal address on our website where donations can be sent to.

We are also currently seeking businesses that can sponsor Horsham & Southwater Community First Responders in kind through the printing of promotional material.

Thank you,

Tim Freeman, Scheme Co-ordinator, Horsham & Southwater Community First Responders.

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Horsham and Southwater Community First Responders