Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to help ensure the safety of Community First Responders.

Community First Responders (CFRs) are volunteers trained by ambulance services to attend certain types of emergency calls in the communities where they live or work. Decisions on operational arrangements, including safety measures and equipment for CFRs, are determined locally by ambulance trusts.

As a complementary resource, CFRs are dispatched only to those calls that appropriately fall within the clinical scope of practice for a volunteer CFR role and assessment of this takes both the safety of the volunteer and patient into account.

My Rt Hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, may, by regulations, make provisions for courses of training for driving vehicles at high speed. It is generally taken that those responding to incidents using blue lights and sirens are trained to an appropriate standard that is recognised by the despatching National Health Service ambulance service. The decision to authorise interested CFR and/or co-responder schemes to use blue lights and sirens and claim exemptions is for local determination by NHS ambulance services.

The CFR scheme is designed so volunteers are typically located close to incidents requiring a response, meaning driving under emergency conditions would typically confer relatively little benefit compared with travelling at normal road speed. Any potential benefits must also be weighed against the increased risks to the public associated with using exemptions to road traffic regulations.