VOLUNTEER EMERGENCY TELEPHONE SYSTEM
To support community resilience, the Community Heartbeat Trust now provides a service to help villages install and run a Volunteer Emergency Telephone System, or VETS.
VETS is designed for to assist where possible in an emergency situation where local help may be quicker to contact, out of activation radius and spread out community situations. VETS is a community-run system and enables up 10-15 “good neighbours” to assist pending the arrival of the emergency services. A local number is used as a single point of contact using "Hunting-Group" technology to ring all volunteers phone numbers simultaneously.
The system can also be used for any emergency where additional help is required from neighbours, whether Cardiac Arrest or not. The availability of VETS helps villages whether or not they are using a CHT provided defibrillator project, and gives a level of reassurance to the elderly, those living alone, and to the infirmed, that there is always help on hand.
"Local neighbourhood volunteers were geographically closer and arrived significantly sooner [to the Cardiac Arrest] than did the EMS service. The approximate time savings from call to arrival with the volunteers was 4–6 min.”
K.B. Kerna, et al; j.resuscitation. 2019.09.016
For further information is contact us.