Durham patient thanks emergency services for saving his life
Media advisory
Who: Patient Andrew Charles and his family, 3 NEAS frontline staff, 1 NEAS volunteer community first responder, 1 doctor from the Great North Air Ambulance Service.
What: Patient reunion with emergency services
Where: Lanchester Road Hospital, Durham, DH1 5RD
When: Monday 7 October 2019 at 10:30am
Why: Andrew Charles suffered a cardiac arrest earlier this year outside one of the college’s at Durham University. The quick response from NEAS volunteer community first responder, Ian Garrett, gave Andrew the best chance of survival by performing lifesaving early intervention, before the other crew and doctors arrived on scene.
Thankfully Andrew survived the trip to hospital and wants to reunite with the people that saved his life to publically thank them in person.
Members of the public saw what happened that day and stopped to offer help and performed CPR. We want the important message of promoting bystander CPR to the wider public, as anyone could save someone’s life in cardiac arrest.
Please let me know prior if you are attending.
Additional notes:
Please note, the location where the reunion is taking place is quite small but there is space outside of the office space which can used for filming or interviews.
A press release and photography will be sent out on the day if you cannot make it.
Notes to editors
For more information, contact the NEAS press office on 07559 918672 or email publicrelations@neas.nhs.uk
About North East Ambulance Service
North East Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (NEAS) covers 3,200 square miles across the North East region. It employs more than 2,600 staff and serves a population of 2.7 million people by handling all NHS111 and 999 calls for the region, operating patient transport and ambulance response services, delivering training for communities and commercial audiences and providing medical support cover at events.
In 2017/18 the service answered over 1.4 million emergency 999 and NHS 111 calls, responded to 280,00 incidents that resulted in a patient being taken to hospital, treated and discharged 27,000 patients with telephone advice and treated and discharged over 100,000 patients at home. In the same year, clinical crews responded to 126,746 of our highest priority patients within the national targets and scheduled care crews completed almost 580,000 patient transport journeys.