I've just been reading my IWA Waterway magazine. What a wonderfull waterway world we live in but... In his cuttings column David Blagrove seems to have a warped idea about our (Shropshire) Community First Responders. Should he ever need medical treatment fast in Shropshire, given the chances are that one of these persons will be first on the scene, I am sure before they treat him they will be happy to tell him that far from a Gobbledegook name their title exactly states what they are. As Shropshire is a large county with small population and so gets less money spent on health via government grants they have evolved a system which places in each area a person with a thorough knowledge of the area (including canals). This person, who has full medical training and drives a car packed with gear is tasked with getting to each medical emergency fast. (Hence the first responder bit.) Once there they obviously stabalise the patient then, if further treatment is needed they can make arrangements for ambulences etc.. In the case given the first responder used her local knowledge to get to the boat , treated the (boat explosion) victim then decided that the access was not good for an ambulence so she flagged down a canal boat and got a lift to a more convenient meeting place to get the man to the ambulence and thence to hospital. This is a perfect example of what a community first responder should do and far from being gobbledegook the title describes perfectly their primary task. Far from slagging off our medical services I feel DB should applaud them for their speed of response and quick thinking. Incidentally, the Advertiser article also got up his nose for using the word barge. Sorry David but in our county it seems the local horseboatmen - who obviously didn't know any better - always called their (narrow) boats barges. And if they got it wrong you should maybe forgive the Advertiser for doing the same.
--- On Tue, 11/11/08, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [canals-list] The way we were - G&S Canal To: [email protected] Date: Tuesday, November 11, 2008, 11:57 AM In a message dated 10/11/2008 20:54:07 GMT Standard Time, captain.beeky@ thornet.co. uk writes: Excuse nasty url http://www.bbc. co.uk/gloucester shire/content/ artic les/2008/09/ 09/dayout_ sharpness_ video_feature. shtml Fell upon quaint BBC documentary from 30 years ago. It's all changed now, and it had all changed then. . . . and for those looking forward to the restoration of the Cotswolds Canals, the same site has another programme on the Golden Valley, including a visit to Sapperton Tunnel and the Daneway DaveD I raise money for charity just by searching the web! www.everyclick. com is an internet search engine with a big difference - it donates half its revenues to charity, please support them too! [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
