.....to our friends at Madeley CFR who successfully completed their final exercise day on 28th April.

Jean and I had a fun day out acting as 'patients' for their exercise. In the morning I 'suffered' three asthma attacks, with Jean acting the part of my distressed wife. To any of the Madeley Responders reading this, I wasn't entirely play acting, as I do have asthma so I know how to put on the appearance of an attack. In fact their assessor got so concerned that I was going to go into a real attack that he suggested I tone it down a bit!

After a splendid lunch provided by those kitchen wizards Mike & Brian from Central Supplies, I had two strokes - my acting must have been reasonably convincing as I was correctly diagnosed - while Jean was laid out in a diabetic coma next to me as the teams demonstrated their ability to cope with multiple casualties.

This was really put to the test in the final incident of the day when all five patients staged a minibus crash. I, as the driver, had suffered a heart attack as a result of running over and killing two resuscitation dummies (or perhaps it was the other way round)

We all gathered together in the school hall for a final de-briefing, and then Co-ordinator Dawn was presented with the official symbol of their success - the bleeper which will summon them to incidents.

To any Responder (or indeed anybody) reading this: if you ever get asked to take part in an exercise as a casualty - do it. Not only are you providing a real service to the community by helping get another Responder Group into active service, but it's good fun - rather like being Best Man at a wedding, all the enjoyment with none of the stress!

Good luck Madeley Responders- all you have to do now is sit and wait for your bleeper to go off. Which it will

First, and most important, we have our car: a Mitsubishi Shogun. It is fully badged and equipped with lights , siren and medical gear, and you should see it around the village as our volunteers practice driving it (but not at high speed with flashing lights)

It displays our motto:Neighbours Helping Neighbours which what First Responding is all about. Click on the motto to jump down the page to see where we got it from.

We can now tell you the source of our two large grant awards:

Go to the Fundraising page for information about all our
sponsors and supporters.

What a week (starting 14th October 2006)

Congratulations to all our trainee responders who successfully passed the practical element of their exam. Having already passed the written part some weeks ago, they are all now qualified Responders. I will try to get one of them to write something for me about the practical exam.

Then we heard that we had been awarded a £10,000 grant towards the purchase of a car.

As if that wasn't enough for one week, we heard from another grant awarding body that we had got another £6,300 for equipment. Our thanks go to Fundraiser Jean who now begins to feel that all the hours of form filling over the summer was worthwhile.

The two bodies concerned have asked that they are not specifically mentioned until the awards have been made public through their own channels, but they will get full publicity here in due course.

We have ordered a car (Mitsubishi Shogun) and uniforms. Now that formal training has finished, we will continue consolidating our learning until the car and equipment are ready to take part in the next available Staffordshire Ambulance Service Incident Day - probably in January - after which we will get our licence to go live.

Links with Canada.

It all started when I was looking for web links for our own website: Google responds well to incoming and outgoing links, so links are valuable from this viewpoint, as well as being a good way of keeping in touch with other groups. At the time I didn't realise just how far keeping in touch can extend.

Initially I joined a First Responders web forum, and there I came across Unit 954, Lac Brome Quebec, Canada and struck up email exchanges with somebody who goes by the screen name of The Ice Dragon

Canada is a staggeringly huge country: second only in size to Russia. Quebec Province alone is about six times the size of the whole of the UK, so I wasn't terribly optimistic when I wrote that we were visiting Toronto (where our daughter lives) and asked ‘how far away are you?’ Back came the answer from Ice Dragon: ‘not far really, do come and see us’ - not far actually being an eight hour drive!

Helen, Jean & Ice Dragon

To begin with I couldn’t even find Lac Brome in my atlas, but with a bit of help and the use of internet maps I eventually discovered it to be about an hour south east of Montreal, and as we had already planned a trip in that direction, it seemed sensible to go that bit further, and so we fixed up a visit.

The quoted eight hours drive involves using Highway 401, the most monumentally boring road I have ever driven on, literally hundreds of miles of dead straight road with pine forests either side which makes a trip on the M6 seem like an interesting and meaningful experience by comparison. We came back that way, but went up the old highway that meanders along the banks of the St. Lawrence River, and took two days over it. We crossed over the river at the huge (2 miles wide) Pont Champlain and soon arrived in Knowlton, the administrative centre of the township of Lac Brome in Quebec's Eastern Township Region

Quebec Province is historically French, but Knowlton is very English, a throwback to the American war of independence when many English people crossed the US border, which is only about twenty miles away, to settle in Canada. Knowlton is a busy little ‘town’, but in terms of population it isn’t much bigger than Waterhouses: the whole of Lac Brome only has a population of about 6,000, and the nearest town of any size, Cowansville, which is about the size of Leek, is known as The City!

We had booked in at the famous & historic Auberge Knowlton, where we quickly settled in and made a phone call to announce our arrival to Ice Dragon. Some time later he arrived, disguised as Responder Alan Bowbrick along with his sister Paulette, also one of the Unit 954 Responder team. They had come to take us for an evening out, so we went with Paulette, following Alan who was driving their Responder vehicle as he was on-call. We drove up the side of Lac Brome and arrived at the home of Helen & Neil McCubbin whose property backs onto the lake, where we were joined by another member of the team, Amy Brown.

Over pre-dinner drinks we were shown their responder vehicle, equipped in a fashion (hardly surprisingly) very similar to a responder vehicle in the UK.
Talk during the evening and the whole of the next day, revealed that in spite of being 3500 miles apart, we had many things in common: the need for rapid response in a rural environment, the willingness of people who want to train in order to fulfill this need, the support of the local community.  We also discovered many differences. Whereas Responders in the UK are linked to Ambulance Services, in Canada they are linked to the Fire Service, probably an explanation of another big difference – that of training. We discovered that we are being taught to do far more than our Canadian counterparts, who are not allowed to carry out many of the procedures that we regard as routine.