South West Bedfordshire MP Andrew Selous visited Dunstable Fire Station to see the new and exciting partnership between Bedfordshire Fire Service and East England Ambulance Services works.
The active co-responder team is based in Leighton Buzzard and the teams work on an on-call function and are alerted to a call via the Ambulance Operations Centre. Teams normally work in pairs and will respond to a wide variety of 999 emergency calls ranging from cardiac arrest calls to patients experiencing stroke symptoms.
Since January 2021 the three co-responder Fire and Rescue Services support teams have responded to over 590 life threatening calls arriving on average within 9 minutes from activation.
After the visit Andrew Selous said,
“The partnership between the two services will allow for the fire and rescue service to be more dynamic, helping with ambulance waiting times and get to patients more quickly which could be lifesaving.”