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Community First Responder
Community First Responders are volunteers who give their time freely to help care for people and save lives in their community. We are everyday members of the general public who are trained to deal with a wide range of potentially life threatening conditions until the arrival of an ambulance.
Very often the role we play is one of reassurance, for example in instances where someone has chest pains, but in more extreme cases we can perform CPR (cardio-pulmonary resuscitation) including the use of a defibrillator.
We provide support to the regular Ambulance Service by attending serious and life threatening 999 calls in Alness and it's immediate surrounding communities, providing the earliest possible intervention for patients in the first few minutes until the arrival of an Ambulance.
The ambulance service dispatcher is able to send us to a range of incidents; we are dispatched at the same time as the ambulance crews but because we live in the community, we often arrive before the ambulance. In cases of cardiac arrest it has been identified that the chance of a positive outcome reduces by 10% for every 1 minute that effective CPR is delayed.
Being a Community First Responder can be incredibly rewarding, as responders we could end up saving someone's life.
