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Public nomination

Winner: Michaela Purdham, Lauren Wilding and Richard York

Special recognition goes to a call handler and emergency care crew for their support to give CPR advice and lifesaving treatment to save a patient’s life

Nominations from members of the public are an enormous endorsement of the work our staff undertake every day and it’s always hard not to award every nomination a winning prize. 

Our patients and wider population are the biggest judges of the quality of care we provide in North East communities; the growing number of nominations in this category each year is a real credit to our staff.

Our winning nomination came from a couple in Darlington who wanted everyone to know what a difference our team made to them when crisis hit.

Beginning with a 999 call to our control room about a patient in cardiac arrest, what followed is something that many of our staff consider to be just part of their job. 

But to the lady making the call and the patient, her husband, what this team did made a significant difference to them.  It meant not only that the patient survived, but that during one of the scariest times in their lives, they had the support, care and treatment they needed to help them overcome it and they had that in spades.

By the time the call to 999 was connected, the patient was unconscious and unresponsive and as a result, the patient's wife was terrified.  From the NEAS operations centre, the call handler kept calm and guided her to perform CPR on her husband with the right pace and depth to give him the very best chance once help arrived.  And whilst an ambulance was dispatched in haste in the background, the call handler continued to coach the caller through CPR despite being overwhelmed and exhausted.

Once on scene, the crew relieved the caller and took over treatment, using a defibrillator to restart the patients heart and safely transport him to Darlington Hospital where he began to recover. 

It is without doubt that if the patient hadn’t had such intervention early on, he might not have survived to tell the tale and so the team effort of everyone involved, played a part in securing their time together today.

In their words, “Without their expert help, it would have been a completely different outcome. We thank them from the bottom of our hearts for their outstanding service.”