Welsh Ambulance Services Trust (WAST) trains and supports volunteers to enable prompt response to 999 calls and to reduce unnecessary hospital admissions.
COMMUNITY WELFARE RESPONDERS
Volunteer Community Welfare Responders support the Welsh Ambulance Service to deliver the right care or advice, in the right place, every time.
Pressure of demands on the emergency response system has meant emergency services prioritise the most urgent cases. Patients deemed to be ‘less urgent’ are having to wait for longer than ever before.
Volunteers can often be on the scene more quickly than ambulance crew. So when 999 calls are made, if the paramedic handling the call judges that an ambulance and full response is not required, they may instead assign the call to volunteers.
VOLUNTEERS
The scheme began in Wales in March 2024. Since then, volunteers have attended around 1,800 emergency calls and have avoided unnecessary ambulance attendance in almost four out of every ten cases (720).
Community Welfare Responders (CWRs), like the more familiar Community First Responders (CFRs), are volunteers, trained and dispatched by the ambulance service. But whilst CFRs provide essential lifesaving treatment and support during crucial minutes before an ambulance crew arrives, CWRs are trained to respond in less life-threatening cases by making basic observations and welfare checks from patients, including heart rate and oxygen levels.
CWRs communicate the results of the tests they carry out, by phone or video, to a clinician, who may be hundreds of miles away. They are, effectively, the eyes and ears of the clinician, enabling them to decide on the most appropriate next steps. That might be sending an ambulance, signposting the patient to their GP, self-care advice or something else.
Involving volunteers allows paramedics to respond to around 15 to 20 cases a day. If they were to attend each call in person, they would only manage one or two.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Channel 5 recently created a video spending a day with Community Welfare Responders.