Community first responders

Scenario practice

Community first responders in Surrey started in March 2006 and has rapidly grown to a total of eight schemes.

Spread across the county, the units provide a very important service to their local community in partnership with the South East Coast Ambulance NHS Trust.

In cases such as chest pains or non-breathing casualties, every second is critical to the casualty. We hope that our CFR units are able to save those vital seconds and minutes by being on-call in their local area and are able to respond if that call comes in.

Neighbourhood first responder scheme has been one of our successes...returning our organisation back to its roots - the community.

John Griffiths
Commissioner, Surrey

Units

In Surrey we have units in

  • Normandy & Wood Street/Fairlands
  • Cranleigh
  • Epsom
  • Ewhurst
  • Godalming
  • Churt
  • Chiddingfold
  • Effingham & District (covering Ockham, the Horsleys, Bookham, Fetcham, Cobham and Leatherhead).

These schemes collectively have approximately 60 responders mostly covering up to 11 hours a day.