1,000 years of dedication to patients honoured at long-service awards

38 recipients from the Norfolk and Waveney region received awards from Chief Executive Neill Moloney with some staff celebrating a remarkable forty years of service to the NHS.

Neill Moloney said: “These awards are a token of the appreciation that we have for the dedication given to our organisation and the NHS – and the decades of knowledge and experience they bring to the care of our patients every day.”

Among the recipients was Jim Whiteside who received an award for 10 years’ service as a volunteer Community First Responder (CFR).

Jim, who works in IT and lives in the Harlston area said he became interested in becoming a CFR while volunteering as a team leader with the Lowland Search and Rescue Team.

Jim said: “We all had to take a short first aid course, and I was interested in that, but thought that I would quickly forget what I had learned. There was a paramedic on our team who suggested I become a CFR. He said that I would get full training and would be a real benefit to my community.”

Being a CFR is now Jim’s main form of volunteering and he now often spends a shift in the control room at Norwich despatching other CFRs to jobs.

He said most of the time as a responder his role is to keep the patient company until an ambulance crew arrives to take over. “It's often said the best thing we do is just to walk in the door - people are having a really bad day to have had to call 999, and the arrival of someone calm who knows what to do can be very reassuring.”

He has had his share of dramatic incidents too. “We can also make a significant difference - cardiac arrest is an obvious example as we carry defibrillators and are trained in effective CPR. I’ve also been called to patients having severe diabetic incidents and have been able to identify this and administer glucogel, and by the time the ambulance crew arrived the patient was starting to recover.”

However, he said that it was the help and support of EEAST colleagues that he valued most. Jim added: “I’ve had a lot of support from the ambulance crews that I’ve worked with over the years and they have given me a lot of encouragement to progress as a CFR,” he said.

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