A voluntary organisation serving the communities of Burghfield, Burghfield Common, Wokefield, Grazeley and Pingewood
This page is a crash course in how the body works and why the CRs were created:
The human body is an incredibly detailed and complex machine. That's why it takes Medical Students 6 years to complete their Doctors exams.
It's also an incedibly simple mechanism which can go on for 80-100 years or can die in 4 minutes without intervention.
At its simplest the body needs Oxygen (the air we breathe), Fluid to pump the Oxygen around (our Blood and Water) and a bit of Electricity every now and then for the Heart (ever heard of a pace-maker?).
The human body is an incredibly detailed and complex machine. That's why it takes Medical Students 6 years to complete their Doctors exams.
It's also an incedibly simple mechanism which can go on for 80-100 years or can die in 4 minutes without intervention.
At its simplest the body needs Oxygen (the air we breathe), Fluid to pump the Oxygen around (our Blood and Water) and a bit of Electricity every now and then for the Heart (ever heard of a pace-maker?).
Why Community Responders exist
Whilst Oxygen is getting in via our Airways and our Breathing & Circulation are keeping it pumping via our Heart and Lungs - then everything is OK.....but....if those processes shut down for just 4 minutes then we are in serious trouble!
| · | Airway |
| · | Breathing |
| · | Circulation |
In-fact - for every minute the body stops breathing or our heart stops pumping, our chances of survival and recovery reduce by 20%.
Some years ago in America, doctors invented a small hand held device called an:
which could perform its own computer analysis ofa patient and provide shocks to re-start their heart in the event of a heart attack.
It was decided that "lay people" - members of the public - could easily be trained in its use and deployment along with other life-saving equipment such as Oxygen tanks and airway masks
IN BRITAIN TODAY:
| · | § Over 300,000 heart-attacks happen every year |
| · | § Over 125,000 of these are fatal |
| · | § There is one heart attack every 2 minutes and 1 fatality from heart failure every four minutes. |
If local members of the community (especially rural ones like ours here in Burghfield and Grazeley) could be trained and equipped with these life-saving kits then death from heart attacks might be greatly reduced.
And so the Community Responder concept was born.
There are now over 100 CR schemes running across Berkshire with more on the way and many more are coming on stream across the UK each week.
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