Hi from all of us at Hato Hone St John Bream Bay
We have been rather busy over the summer months and now settling back to cope with winter and all it brings.. and yes, some lovely days of course, as well as the occasional sniffles!! Hopefully most of you have had the ‘flu jab’ and it’s working well for you.
We have had a busy summer with breaking the record of 81 jobs to responding to 101 in the month of January this year. Jobs to date for this year are now 501. The total for 2010 was 829, so it is looking to be a lot busier this year.
We would all like to say a huge thank-you to our community for being so generous when we were out there, in the rain and wind and, (well, it was just horribly cold wasn’t it!!), with our buckets, stickers, Flash-a-light badges and pleads for donations. We raised over $5,000!! - and all this money stays here in Bream Bay and goes towards the costs of running of our local ambulance station. This is overseen by our Bream Bay Hato Hone St John Area Committee. This dedicated group of volunteers keep accurate records of our financial wellbeing, (our Treasurer is ‘very smiley’ with the above donation of course!!!), distributing funds towards maintenance of our buildings, upgrades internally as well as updating our IT equipment, training gear, study books, and all manner of things to keep us running in top gear.
We have settled well into our nice shiny Mercedes ambulance! As in the last article, we got this around a year ago with about 400kms on the clock and now, in a year we have clocked over 59,700kms!! If any of you are interested in having a look at our ambulances, please don’t hesitate to come to the station and have a nosey around… we love showing off our toys, and particularly our ‘newish’ ambulance!
We have 24 volunteers here now, all at different stages of skill levels. 6 are in the process of attaining the National Diploma in Ambulance Practice; 4 volunteers now have a Casual Relief officer contract, (this enables them to be paid when relieving fulltime officers at various stations), and 1 is now a permanent relief officer within Northland. We were to employ two more fulltime officers here at Bream Bay station this year, (and another 2 at other stations in the north), but the costs of diverting monies to help with the Christchurch earthquake has set that back by another year. So luckily we do have a good number of volunteers to help us crew our ambulance here in the meantime but when some go onto courses, are away with paid work, on holidays, etc, we are still looking for more new officers to help us. Most are looking towards becoming fulltime officers in the future when they begin their career, and with a lot of work and dedication, they do get there.
I am running another of the Everyday First Aid courses again – on the 20th August, here at the ambulance station – from 9am to 1pm. We have a lot of fun and the sessions include learning all about CPR, how to do bandaging & splinting, what to do if you come across a person having a seizure, a diabetic in trouble, a stroke problem, etc. Please see the accompanying advert for further details, and I look forward to seeing you there.
So from us all at Hato Hone St John Bream Bay, we hope you all have a safe winter – keep up with the Vitamin C and don’t forget ‘seatbelts on’, especially the children in the back seat! Until next time….
Barb Lock
Operations Team Manager
Bream Bay Hato Hone St John