A senior North East Ambulance Service paramedic has been reunited with a four-year-old patient live on ITV’s This Morning.
Steve Miles, aged 42, was invited to appear on ITV’s This Morning as part of a ‘Christmas Heroes’ feature, in recognition of his life-saving work on the Critical Care Ambulance Response Unit, which led to him winning the Emergency Care category at North East Ambulance Service’s Beyond the Call of Duty awards in October.
Senior paramedic Steve Miles was working on North East Ambulance Service’s CARU in January this year when he was dispatched to the home of Jan who had fallen in a pond.
Steve worked alongside his ambulance crew colleagues and Great North Air Ambulance Service to save Jan’s life, before he was transported to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle.
Jan underwent hours of life saving surgery but has gone on to make a full recovery and he was able to give Steve an early Christmas present when he appeared live on ITV’s This Morning to say thank you.
Steve’s record of achieving a return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC) for the sickest patients is unmatched within NEAS with 105 out of 200 incidents in the last year alone – and there are many examples of where he has directly contributed to saving the lives of patients presenting with cardiac arrest and other critical conditions.
Steve enjoys an unprecedented number of appreciations from staff and patients for the exceptional compassion, leadership, commitment and clinical expertise he shows.
Acknowledged by those nominating him as a natural leader in highly charged and emotive emergency situations, Steve loves passing on his knowledge to others and is recognised as a ‘go to’ person at NEAS for advice on cardiac arrest, critical care and ECG analysis.
Steve, who lives in Cramlington with wife Bev and eight-year-old son Alex, left his career as an electronics engineer to join NEAS as a trainee advanced technician in 2003, having first volunteered as one of the Trust’s first community first responders. He qualified as a paramedic in 2006. He said;
As a first responder I was out in the community directly helping people and I loved that. The job is so unpredictable you don’t know what’s going to happen next, and it’s all about problem solving which really fit with my engineering background.
What I love about the job now is that as I have gained more experience and skills, I’m able to offer more and more to my patients.
We see people at possibly the worst point in their lives. I know that by having these extra skills I am able to make a real difference. I’ve done this job for 15 years and in all that time, Jan is up there.
Jan’s father, Stefan said:
We are deeply in gratitude for the actions of Steve as we are for all the emergency services, doctors and nurses. They all played vital roles in saving Jan.
Yvonne Ormston, NEAS chief executive, said:
It’s always difficult to nominate just one superstar as all of our staff are amazing in my eyes but Steve in particular embodies our Trust values in everything he does.
As you can imagine the Emergency Care category of our staff awards is a particularly difficult category to judge but Steve’s dedication to his patients and his passion for the paramedic role and its future development made him stand out as this year’s worthy winner and it was a real pleasure for us to be able to recognise him further through ITV’s This Morning.
Steve was one of a huge team of people who saved Jan’s life that day, starting from the call handler and ending with our fantastic hospital colleagues. This system wide work goes largely unnoticed every day but we are incredibly proud to be part of both the emergency care and NHS family, saving lives throughout the North East every day.
