Scilly Emergency Services to work together
Emergency services on the Isles of Scilly and beyond spent a day last week discussing how to work more closely together.
Wednesday's meeting on St Mary's was attended by the Isles of Scilly Fire & Rescue Service; Cornwall Fire, Rescue & Community Services; Devon & Cornwall Police; the South West Ambulance Trust; HM Coastguard; the RNLI; St Mary's Harbour; Isles of Scilly Council and the Isles of Scilly Community Safety Partnership.
Paul Davies, Assistant Chief Constable for Devon and Cornwall Police, chaired the meeting. He told This is Scilly afterwards: "Part of my portfolio is local policing, which includes the Isles of Scilly. I’ve been here for a couple of days meeting with the new Sergeant Darren White, who’s here with the team doing a great job.
"Today we’ve held an event on St Mary’s to discuss with most of the agencies that provide a service here on the islands how we might work more closely together, work more collaboratively, and seek opportunities to ensure that the service we’re providing across agencies is as good as it can be for those who live and work and visit the islands.
"We all work well together anyway but I think there is scope for some more co-ordinated activity, to do things like sharing our radio systems, to look at our training provision to ensure that as far as possible it's on the islands so that our staff don’t have to go to the mainland - we’ve made some inroads there already with some first aid training - the use of equipment, use of boats has been discussed and how we might collectively just make use of the resources we have available to us to come together so the sum is bigger than the parts."
He added: "All in all a really positive, productive day. All the talking now needs to be supplemented by activity and I’m sure that will continue going forward."
Kathryn Billing, Area Manager of Service Delivery for the Cornwall Fire & Rescue Service, posted several photos of the event on Twitter (below).
She wrote: "Absolutely superb attendance at our IOS collaboration event - looking forward to positive discussions about working more efficiently together to make the IOS safer."