We are a group of trained University of Nottingham (UoN) students who volunteer as Co-Responders with the East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) to provide high quality and life-saving, pre-hospital care to patients with life-threatening medical emergencies and injuries. Since the scheme's launch in 2014, we have volunteered over 54,000 hours and have been dispatched to 16,000 emergency 999 calls, positively impacting the lives of thousands of patients and families in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Thanks to our active, experienced and highly trained volunteers (and students at UoN), we are proud to be the country's biggest and busiest university Co-Responder scheme.

With three ambulance response vehicles and specialist medical equipment, we arrive first on the scene to 68% of our dispatched jobs, enabling patients to receive vital emergency care quicker than it would otherwise have come. As full-time students studying intense healthcare degrees, we want to continue volunteering our limited free time where it is needed the most, with patients responding to 999 calls.

UoN Co-Responders are financially dependent on EMAS and the University of Nottingham and its Student’s Union for our operational equipment as well as our 3 response cars. However, we rely on corporate and individual donors to remove financial barriers, enabling us to maintain the highest standard of patient care by providing the best training for our responders. For example, we rely on annual donations to fund each cohort of our responders to achieve their FREC 3 and FREC 4 qualifications. These qualifications are a stepping stone for our responders which will contribute to making them into the best future doctors they can be. Furthermore, funding supports our responders in obtaining their Awards in Education and Training, which allows us to internalise training and run quality Continuing Professional Development (CPD) sessions. This enhances our responders' skills and ensures they deliver the highest standard of patient care in the field. We also rely on fundraising to supply the core items at the very foundation of our scheme (including everyday basics which have broken or been worn out) in our kit, bags, store room and cars to keep everything fully operational.

We would like to invite you to donate, either one-off or regularly, or to sponsor our scheme, for which we would be very grateful. Thank you for your support in advance!

You can find out more and see regular scheme updates from our Instagram account, @uonresponders, and on our website at www.uonresponders.co.uk.