Teaming up to save lives in NZ
Fire and Emergency New Zealand and the Northland Rescue Helicopter have teamed up in an effort to provide firefighters with a faster method of arriving at incidents where people need their assistance in order to allow them to receive medical care
Fire and Emergency New Zealand and the Northland Rescue Helicopter have teamed up in an effort to provide firefighters with a faster method of arriving at incidents where people need their assistance in order to allow them to receive medical care. The helicopter crew will fly medics and two firefighters to incidents where victims have been trapped inside a car, for instance, and need to be cut free so that medics can reach them. The addition of the firefighters to the crew would not just be limited to car accidents, however, with the organisations saying that industrial or farming accident victims could also benefit from the swift arrival of the enhanced team.
Dean Voelkerling, a rescue helicopter pilot, said that there had been several incidents he had attended where patients would have benefitted from the presence of the firefighters. Brad Mosby, commander of Fire and Emergency New Zealand, said the move would ‘mean quick intervention, which is fantastic for communities and visitors to Northland’.
Wally Mitchel, St John Northland acting district operations manager, pointed out that it is always a priority to have the paramedics onboard, and that once on scene, the firefighters would have to make it back to their base under their own steam if patients were being flown for medical care. There will be a cache of tools, such as battery-operated cutters and a set of spreaders, stored at the helicopter base, so that when a call comes in, firefighters will just need to get themselves to the rescue helicopter base.