TO KURNAL,
you quoted saying previously "if you have a heart attack you hope you are in a area where the fire service co-responds and not elswhere".
Who's area would you rather be in if your house was on fire or you were trapped in your car and the local fire crew were not available because young billy had a nose bleed, and the next nearest fire engine was 30 minutes away???
The fire service has always and always will provide medical care to the best of their ability throughout the course of their duties.However they should not be used as a undertrained inadequate alternative to a highly skilled paramedic or ambulance crew.
I fully support and admire individuals who co-respond as members of the public in their own time, what i cannot support is ,
My local retained fire stn, volunteer to co-respond, can respond on a fire engine with a crew of 3, however that then leaves the local community with no local fire cover, even when the fire appliance is completed its duties at a co-responding call it is still unavailable due to insufficient crew. The additional training is non existent, just another tick in the box for the fire authourity, and the ambulance service targets are sometimes met.
To much emphasis is related to heart attacks and defibs within this role, the majority of these calls attended are not genuine cat a calls. The reason defibs are found in train stns, shopping malls etc, if someone suffers a cardiac arrest they require treatment then and on the spot, not from a retained fire crew who take 5mins to respond to stn, travel time, call handling time, times up!!!!!
Be totally honest your and my community would be up in arms when a local death occurs because your fire appliance was unavailable because of it undertaking other duties. What people should be doing is lobbying their MPs in order to provide a adequately funded ambulance service.
As a previous post stated what next, friday sat nights, police are a bit busy should we put on our stab vests and patrol our local streets serving the community!! or the binmen are struggling with the extra rubbish over xmas, ill just put on my donkey jacket to serve the community.
Finally no one has answered the question " undertaking training of only 2hrs a week, is this sufficient to be a competent firefighter and a co- responder" , i dont think so