Frontenac County Pilot Project Neighbours Saving Neighbours

by Jeff Green

As an emergency room physician and researcher into cardiac arrest and resuscitation, Dr. Stephen Brooks of the Kingston Health Sciences Centre, and Queen's University, is well aware of a rather startling reality faced by patients when they suffer heart attacks.

“For every minute when a patient's heart is not beating, which is what a heart attack or cardiac arrest is, their chances of being resuscitated decrease by 10%,” he said.

Even the best responses to the highest priority calls, in urban centres like Kingston, take about 6 minutes, Dr. Brooks said, and in rural locations with lower population

Shots Fired In North Frontenac

Frontenac Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) officers are investigating after several shots were fired at two motor vehicles in a remote part of North Frontenac.

On March 12th, 2023, at 12:00 p.m., OPP responded to a weapons complaint on Schooner Road in North Frontenac. The initial investigation indicates that on March 10, 2023, between 6:30 a.m. and 6:45 a.m., an unknown person(s) attended the area and fired several rounds from a firearm which struck two parked vehicles.

There were no reported injuries.

Frontenac OPP is requesting the public's assistance in identifying the person(s) that is responsible.

If you or anyone you know are aware of the individuals' identity or have any further information about this incident, you are asked to contact the Frontenac County OPP at 613-372-1932 or the OPP Communication Centre at 1-888-310-1122.

If you wish to remain anonymous, you may call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 (TIPS), where you may be eligible to receive a cash reward of up to $2,000. ■ densities, the response is much slower than that, because of distances.

In Frontenac County, as in other parts of the province, the local volunteer fire departments, as well as paramedics, are dispatched to medical emergency calls, and they are often the first to arrive and are trained in resuscitation, and equipped with defibrillators.

“You need multiple layers of response,” said Dr. Brooks, “in order to shave minutes off the response time. That’s where Neighbours Saving Neighbours comes in.

Several years ago, he spent a year in Scotland, and while he was there, he studied a community based cardiac arrest response program in Aberdeen and the surrounding region.

“There are a series of rural villages in the countryside near Aberdeen where this program was developed. What happens there, is that at the same time as paramedics are dispatched in response to a cardiac arrest, a call also goes out to the neighbours who have been trained and equipped in resuscitation and live close to where the call is coming from. The idea is to bring that program to Ontario.”

With funding from Queen's, Brooks approached Frontenac Paramedic Services to operate a pilot project, focussing on rural Kingston (north of the 401) and Frontenac County. The Neighbours Saving Neighbours pilot project, which will be launched soon by Frontenac County, will start by seeking volunteers throughout the region to join the program.

“When a call comes in to the dispatch centre in Kingston, after contacting emergency services, and only if they have time, the dispatcher will then put out a notification on an app that will then notify the volunteers located closest to where the call is coming from,” he said.

The research project that Dr. Brooks is running, as part of the pilot, is being designed to measure the time savings before the initial response to the 50-60 cardiac arrest calls that come in each year in Frontenac County.

“If we save 5 or 6 minutes from the average response

The project is being developed and will be operated by Frontenac Paramedic Services (FPS). Jason Kervin, who

He said that individuals who want to get involved will take part in an initial session, which can be done virtually,

“We are still designing the program, but we see the live session running about 5-6 hours,” he said. “There will be ongoing contact with participants every couple of months, which we think will have both live and online participation, and we expect those not to be long sessions. We don’t want to make joining the program too much of a burden tors (AED’s) are available to get the program underway, and to start up the program they will be shared among volunteers who live near each other.

“If we have a cluster of volunteers in a place like Verona or Sharbot Lake, they will be able to trade off the AED among each other based on who is most available on certain days of the week,” he said. “Ideally we would like to have an AED with each volunteer, but that will take time.”

The program has been under development for over 2 years, with delays due to COVID and other factors.

Even though it is waiting for one final protocol to be worked out before it is officially launched, a website has been built and is up and running on the Engage Frontenac platform, under Frontenac County projects.

The site outlines how the program will work, and in