A voluntary mountain rescue team NEWSAR in Wales have won the annual subscription to the life saving software Decisions For Heroes at the Emergency Services Show 2009 in Stoneleigh Park.

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EMERGENCY SERVICES SHOW, UNITED KINGDOM (3rd December 2009) - Decisions For Heroes is a web application that saves lives. It does this by helping rescue teams record and analyse their rescue operations and training. North East Wales Search And Rescue (NEWSAR), part of Mountain Rescue England & Wales have won an annual subscription to the software as visitors to the Emergency Services Show 2009 in Stoneleigh Park, Coventry.

“We're delighted to use D4H to optimise our rescue operations” said Richard Dobson on announcement of the prize. As NEWSAR’s training officer, Richard can sign-in to the software before their training exercises and run a report on team attendance hours, getting a break-down of members skills requiring attention. Now he can determine what they trained in, who trained in it, and when they last practised a technique.



Easy-to-generate statistics can be used to observe patterns and reduce accidents in North East Wales. With integrated mapping, NEWSAR can generate heat maps of their callouts and compare them to their training locations. With this data the team can now approach other local organisations with real measurements to show where warning signs should be located and public safety awareness focussed.

NEWSAR are currently fundraising for £84,000 to replace a pair of old and increasingly unreliable Landrovers. These vehicles are the only way the team can get its equipment into the remote places where operations are often conducted.

View photo gallery from our stand at the show.

About NEWSAR:
NEWSAR is a completely voluntary organisation, operating on charitable donations. The team of around 40 volunteers answers calls from the Police and Ambulance service for assistance in locating, treating and evacuating people in trouble in rural, mountainous and sometimes more urban areas. The team has capabilities that complement the statutory emergency services with the ability to operate day and night in remote and hazardous terrain in almost all weathers. NEWSAR’s primary area covers a huge swathe of North Wales, from the coast down to mid Wales and from the Conwy valley across to the M6. The team can be called to incidents outside this area, supporting other teams in North Wales.

Visit their website http://www.newsar.org.uk

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We're testing new analysis of team response times with one of our large organisations. This allows teams to measure and trend their "Time-To-Mobile" (also known as Notice To Move or NTM) which is the time it takes from an Alert until you are Mobile enroute to the incident. This lets teams make sure they are responding within target response times.

When you add an incident, you now get 3 options.

Immediate Tasking - this is the typical setting for first response teams. Your team are going from station, home, or work and are trying to get their equipment or vehicles mobile to the incident as fast as is safely possible.

Pre-Tasked - this is the case when your team are put on alert that they will be required at a certain time. This might be waiting for somebody to get to a certain altitude on a mountain, for a ship to come into fuel range, or knowledge that you are required at a forest fire the next day. In this case the time-to-mobile is not important to the success of the response and we will not compare it against your targets.

Tasked While Mobile - in this case, your team were already mobile on a training exercise or returning to base. In this case your time-to-mobile will be almost zero, so we will not include it in your target responses.

While the response time targets, trending, and analysis are not available to everyone yet, we decided to switch on the data input side so you can begin categorisation. Please note, any past incidents can be edited if you'd like to back-date the tasking on them. We'll let you know once the response time analysis is live for everyone - please submit any requests on this topic to info@decisionsforheroes.com

FREE GIVEAWAY - We have a special gift today for 2 Irish rescue teams. Vodafone have very kindly sponsored 2 mobile broadband modems with 3 months free internet access for us to giveaway to two of you. This will allow you to access the internet at broadband speed from a laptop anywhere there is mobile phone signal. Perfect for Decisions For Heroes!

• We have 2 free Vodafone prepay mobile broadband modems to give away.


• Each comes with 3 months free broadband.


• The three months credit will be applied to the modem over three consecutive months and each month will include Internet access for one month with a 5GB download limit.


• The Prepay Mobile Broadband prize is for use on the Vodafone network and will not be transferred by Vodafone for use on another network.

MORECAMBE BAY, UK - Paul Calland is the Deputy Station Officer for Bay Search and Rescue (BSAR), another group of our amazing people.

BSAR provide support, dedicated equipment, specialist Hagglund BV206 all terrain amphibious vehicles and trained personnel to assist H.M. Coastguard, The Police, Mountain Rescue Teams and other Emergency Services on and around the very unique Morecambe Bay and South Lake District Area in the UK.

We spoke to Paul about how BSAR use Decisions For Heroes (D4H):

Talking about planning, availability, and communication.

"Bay Search and Rescue is a typical independent volunteer team; the crew all have 'day' jobs and time is very valuable. Both the Station Officer, Gary and myself as Deputy Station Officer live some way from our base, so D4H is ideal for ensuring we know what team members are available and that we can contact them quickly. However more important to us is the superb concise way that Training and Events etc can be planned in a team calendar, with weekly briefings by text to the team, and that all these and our Incidents can be efficiently documented from any PC where ever we are."

"Within the first week of using D4H we had a call from the RAF wanting details and locations of previous incidents for their records. The fact that we could almost instantly send a detailed analysis and breakdown of these, with reports for each and location maps of our local hotspots was fantastic. Before D4H we would have been rooting through filing cabinets and taking photos of a map full of pins on the wall!"

"In the recent Floods in Cumbria we were called out three times in two days. The third call was for our Hagglund ATERV (All Terrain Emergency Rescue Vehicle) on its truck to be blue light escorted straight to Cockermouth where the worst floods had taken place. Our role was to follow in after the initial boat crews, once the water levels were too low and the debris and underwater hazards too great for them to operate safely. Our ATERV can travel where boats and landrovers cannot, and allow us to evacuate up to 14-16 people at one time in a warm, dry, non-traumatising way (unlike boats and helicopters). We assisted numerous people and completed task after task from the Bronze Command Centre. All these were logged into D4H as we went along, which generated our incident report, which was printed at the click of a button - brilliant. I can safely say no one joins an SAR team to do paperwork. D4H makes the paperwork we have to do easy and the built in maps, grid refs, casualty reports etc provide all the report information anyone may ever need from us."