Ambulance Service welcomes Norwegian Visitors

Officials from a Norwegian ambulance service were in the North West this week to find out how the region's ambulance service reacts to medical emergencies.

The Norwegian officials included paramedics, union representatives and the chief ambulance officer. The group met and heard from NWAS experts and talked about emergency care and major incident resilience at the Trust's headquarters in Bolton, Greater Manchester.

Also on display for the Norwegian group to explore were major incident response vehicles which included a decontamination unit, incident support vehicle and communications hub which are regularly used by specialist paramedics trained to deal with hazardous events.

"Like the north west ambulance service, we cover a similar mix of urban and rural areas so were keen to find out how this service operates in comparison," said Ola Borstad, assistant head of the pre-hospital care division at the Norwegian ambulance service. "We were particularly interested and very impressed with alternative models of care that the north west ambulance service offers to the public such as community first responders."

Director of Emergency Services at NWAS, Derek Cartwright, said: "We were honoured and privileged to be able to showcase our capabilities to a visiting service and in doing so were able to share best practice and gain a better understanding of the challenges ambulance services across the globe face."

The visitors were from the largest ambulance service in Norway covering a population of 1.1 million people and responding to 125 thousand calls per year, compared with seven million people in the North West and one millions calls answered by NWAS per year.

At the end of their visit there was an exchange of plaques to commemorate the occasion.