Gun police lack good medical back-up
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Your support makes all the difference.POLICE marksmen are frequently sent to firearms incidents without any medical back-up, a Home Office funded study has found.
The number of times police have been issued with firearms has risen sixfold in the last 10 years to about 12,000, and examination of firearms incidents found that there were gaps in providing immediate medical care in a significant number of cases.
The authors of the study say the first 15 minutes in any trauma are critical and can make all the difference to a casualty's chance of survival.
Firearms officers should be given special medical training or forces should send a doctor out with the marksmen, suggest the two police officers who carried out the unpublished study.
Featured in Police Review magazine, PCs Stuart Campbell and Alasdair Wright, both firearms officers with the Cumbria force, said that rural areas were particularly badly affected because of the difficulty of getting an ambulance quickly to a shooting incident.
Their research revealed that most forces inform the ambulance service of a firearms incident but few have any formal arrangements to ensure medics would be at the scene.
"We started to question what an ambulance 'on standby' actually means," said PC Campbell.
"Does it mean it's at the station, around the corner or just available when the request was made and is now on another job?"
The research found that often there was effectively no cover. Calling for immediate improvements, the authors warned that the authorities must not wait until another tragedy such as Hungerford or Dunblane before acting.
"Armed Response Vehicles were introduced after Hungerford; the handgun ban after Dunblane. We don't want another tragedy before we push for immediate care," said PC Wright.
Results from questionnaires to all 43 forces in England and Wales have suggested that about six in every ten firearms incidents are spontaneous and therefore unlikely to have proper medical cover.
The importance of medical care for both police and public casualties was highlighted by the rise in the number of armed operations in England and Wales - a total of 12,379 occasions in 1996-97, compared to 8,476 the previous year and 5,824 two years ago.
The forces where firearms were issued most frequently were the Metropolitan Police, 2,439, Northumbria, 1,360, Cleveland, 1,026, Merseyside, 671, and West Yorkshire, 617.
But despite the increased availability of guns among criminals, the number of incidents at which police actually fired their weapons has remained steady since 1995 at five a year.
At present, there is no national standard for providing medical care in the event of an injury to a member of the public, an officer or a suspect.
PCs Campbell and Wright believe that all firearms officers should receive medical training to a recognised national standard.
They also highlighted an alternative system in Kent where a doctor automatically accompanies the firearms team.
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