South Central Ambulance Charity

Who we are

South Central Ambulance Charity exists to help the ambulance service in Oxon, Berks, Bucks and Hants. Based within the ambulance service HQ in Bicester we have spent this year building a strategy and brand, and in October we launched our first big appeal.  Our catchment area comprises about 4000 square miles and the ambulaen service we support serves 4 million people .

We want to raise £1m by Christmas 2019 in  order to:

• Say thank you to the amazing ambulance service staff by investing more than the NHS gives in their ideas to improve the service, expand their training, improve their work environments and provide them with more specialist equipment to help  us all when we need it.

• Train and equip volunteer community first responders (CFRs) – the people in your community who have been trained to provide a life saving response to their neighbours while an ambulance is on its way. The charity already has over 1000 volunteers trained to start saving lives while an ambulance is on its way and last year they answered over 15000 calls for help. Every volunteer costs the charity about £2000 to train and equip.

• Train and equip communities to save lives by providing more life-saving equipment such as public access defibrillators, and giving local people the confidence to use them. We want to make sure that no-one in our region is more than 8 minutes away from a public access defibrillator, and we need to raise £1850 for every one we install.

We are the front door to a wide range of volunteering roles in the ambulance service, details of which can be found on our website.