Community First Response - New Zealand Resilience Trust

A Community First Responder is a volunteer who agrees to undertake training in order to be able to provide life saving treatment to those people within their community who are critically injured or ill in the first few minutes prior to the arrival of an ambulance.

In many instances of medical emergencies, certain simple but critical interventions performed within the first few minutes can result in a life being saved or disability reduced. In particular this applies to heart attacks, choking and injuries that have caused someone to lose consciousness.
In recent times there has been much discussion about the inability for the current model of delivering pre-hospital emergency care to cope. Back in September 2007 the Federation of Ambulance Officers Unions (FOUNZ) stated there were “growing concerns about public, patient and Paramedic safety due to inadequate levels of funding, governance and other systemic failings.” In more recent times the Health Select Committee reported that single-crewed ambulances were putting patients' lives and paramedics' safety at risk.

Few ambulance services in New Zealand can get to a 111 call within minutes. There is a period of time between the 111 call being made and the ambulance arriving which little or no emergency care takes place. This time period is known as the 'therapeutic vacuum'. Whilst St John Ambulance and Wellington Free Ambulance have attempted to mitigate this through their emergency communication centres, this is not a substitute for having a person trained in pre-hospital emergency care at the scene.

New technologies and improved training means medical interventions that were traditionally the purview of paramedics can now be safely and effectively performed by members of the general public. These people can fill the therapeutic vacuum and provide essential simple treatment in those crucial first few minutes, and potentially save significant amounts of health dollars.
It is plain to see from the UK experience that community responders can work in well with existing ambulance services. The New Zealand Resilience Trust well-positioned to lead the way in developing community based first responders in this country.

Community First Responders are volunteers who are willing to be trained to respond to calls from a local ambulance service to provide urgent aid to someone within their own community. This ability to self-respond to the community’s need contributes to resilience. It also contributes to the improvement of the holistic wellbeing of the community as those volunteers are involved in other community projects and groups.

The NZRT’s uniformed service – the New Zealand Resilience Corps – is ideally suited to adopt a community first response function, as it already has members staffing community ambulances. The NZRT itself is gaining accreditation as an ambulance service under NZS8156:2008, and will be seeking membership with Ambulance New Zealand.

The Trust already has a community ambulance established in the northern suburbs of Wellington City, staffed by specially-trained volunteers from the North Wellington Resilience Corps.

Documentation available for you to download:

PDF: Media Release - Launch of community ambulance service

PDF: Equipment list for event ambulance

PDF: Scope of clinical practice guidelines

PDF: Patient focus guidelines