In December 2022, Dr Gupteswar Patel and Prof Niro Siriwardena from CaHRU successfully secured funding from the Lincoln Policy Hub to engage decision- and policy-makers for ambulance services and CFR schemes at local, regional and national levels ito co-create and inform policy relating to CFRs and to explore improvements and innovations in CFR schemes.
Community First Responder (CFR) schemes in the United Kingdom seek to involve communities in health care. CFRs have been providing emergency and prehospital care to communities for over a decade. The CFRs are community members or off-duty medical and allied health professionals, trained by ambulance services to reach a potential life-threatening emergency in the first vital minutes and provide appropriate care until more highly skilled ambulance staff arrive. They can also actively raise awareness of health issues, provide support to individuals impacted by them, and serve as a link between healthcare professionals and the general public.
Our recent study of ‘Community First Responders’ role in the current and future rural health and care workforce’, led by Niro Siriwardena showed that CFRs contributed to a significant number and proportion of the most urgent emergency calls (Botan et al 2023), particularly in rural areas but also revealed problems and potential solutions for governance, deployment, recruitment and retention of CFRs (Patel et al 2023), and investigated actual and potential innovations that could be spread or introduced to support CFRs and CFR schemes across the country.
CaHRU has employed a range of innovative research approaches to investigate gaps in local and regional healthcare and to identify solutions through policy debates and engagement. These problems include, but are not limited to a contribution to patient outcomes, clinical and operational practice, building the evidence base and informing policies.
A series of stakeholder engagement activities will be undertaken to inform policies for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of CFRs and ambulance services, therefore impacting the lives of patients and the public accessing prehospital emergency care delivered by CFRs. This policy engagement activity will also enhance knowledge of the policy environment and enforce evidence-based decision-making.
This project will strengthen collaboration between CaHRU academics and national policy experts and co-produce policies on CFR schemes, especially governance, scope of practice, inclusivity, recruitment, retention and innovations. Collaboration and co-production between researchers and policy-makers will increase the policy impact. A crucial aspect of this project is to conduct a stakeholder workshop at the 999 EMS conference in June 2023 to understand the effect of the project on policy and practice.