Just seven months into our charity partnership with FBR Recruitment, the team have already raised £3,300.
The local construction recruitment team have been laying the foundations for a successful year, with a variety of events, challenges and team building sessions.
So much so, FBR Recruitment has chosen to support us beyond this year through to 2026.
Below are some of the activities the team from FBR have been up to so far this year.
Charity golf day
On Friday 13 June, FBR Recruitment hosted its first charity golf day.
The response was incredible, with the fairways of Bramshaw Golf Club filled with generous supporters from across the industry.
Raffle ticket sales, donations and auction prizes helped the team raise more than £3,000 on the day – putting a large dent in their £4,000 target.
CPR for FBR
Fewer than 1-in 10 people in the UK survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.
Our CPR Skills for Life sessions help people in our region feel confident in identifying cardiac arrest and performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
The team at FBR Recruitment kicked off the start of Spring by enrolling their colleagues in our CPR sessions. In March, we visited their offices in Whiteley to deliver the session.
The team got hands on, practising chest compressions and using an automated external defibrillator.
Maddie Green, FBR Recruitment Marketing Coordinator, said:
“Choosing Hampshire and Isle of Wight Air Ambulance as our Charity of the Year has been an incredibly meaningful decision for us at FBR Recruitment.
“We’ve really enjoyed getting stuck into fundraising – from monthly bake-offs and our pool tournament to the charity golf day, which helped us raise an amazing £3,200 so far.
“A real highlight for us was visiting the airbase.
“Seeing firsthand the dedication, professionalism and hard work of the team was genuinely inspiring, and it reminded us exactly why we’re doing this.
“We’re now even more motivated to hit our £4,000 target, with a team walk coming up in September and our Director running three marathons.”
Emergency Caesarean section training
Sarah has been using her crafting skills to help Dr Ben create training models for the crew’s emergency caesarean training.
Here’s Dr Ben on the significance of these models and how much FBR’s help has impacted us.
“Emergency Caesarean section is fortunately a very rare occurrence for us. Most pre-hospital clinicians will never do one for real in their whole career. But we have to be equipped, trained and ready to do one at a moment’s notice.
“Because there are so few air ambulance services in the country, there is no ‘off the shelf’ training model in existence. To have one custom made by a commercial simulation company would cost the charity thousands of pounds which could be used providing care.
Dr Ben and Sarah creating models for essential training
“So, we have done extensive materials testing and worked through a number of prototypes to produce our own models, in-house. Each model can only be used once, so we need a total of around 16 over the course of this training year to give everyone the hands-on experience they need.
“They are complex constructions, hand-stitched together to make them as realistic as possible, to maximise the quality of the learning experience. But this means they take hours to put together.
“We are therefore extremely grateful to Sarah Lucas from FBR Recruitment, who stepped up and offered her time to help build some models for us. We had a fun morning at the charity office in Adanac Park familiarising her with the construction process.
“Sarah is now a fully qualified model-maker and will be providing parts for the remaining training sessions of 2025.”
Members of FRB Recruitment toured our Airbase and helicopter at the start of the partnership
A date has been set for their next challenge in September: an 18km walk from Hengistbury Head Beach to Bournemouth Pier – and back again!
Follow their progress and support the team via their JustGiving page.
