My Account
A team of firefighters in boots and fluoro jackets probably isn’t what most pregnant women envisage being surrounded by when they go into labour. But that was the reality for a Wellsford woman earlier this month when she dialed 111 for emergency transport to hospital.
Normally, an ambulance would respond but as there were none available in Wellsford at the time, the call went through to the Wellsford Volunteer Fire Brigade. As luck would have it, it was a regular Tuesday training night at the station with plenty of firefighters on hand.
However, for the first time in the brigade’s history, an all-woman crew responded, led by Tarah Jones.
The crew arrived on the scene around 7.30pm and by 8pm had delivered a healthy baby girl.
“We were all pretty stoked,” Jones says.
While firefighters aren’t directly given midwife training, they do regularly attend first aid courses. The crew also included nurse Lynley Searle and trainee nurse Kaitlin Bowmar, and three of the four team members were mothers, although none had ever delivered a baby before. Once mum and bub had been safely handed over to the St John for transport to North Shore Hospital, the fire crew returned to the station.
“Training was still going on, but we were all on too much of a high to join in, so we just sat around talking about what had just happened,” Jones says. “We were just really glad we were there to help.”
