Volunteers attending 2,000 emergency calls a year

Craig Smith and Karan Botsford are volunteer medics working shifts for Nars

A charity which provides volunteer medics to respond to emergencies is answering more calls than ever before.

Norfolk Accident Rescue Services (Nars) has responded to more than 2,000 calls in the past year.

Nars, which was founded in 1970, has a base in Dereham, four response vehicles and a network of 50 volunteer doctors, nurses, paramedics and other first responders.

The charity sends medics to emergency calls including road accidents and cardiac arrests.

Rose Jackson-Nichols is the charity's fundraising manager

The NHS supports Nars with some paid clinicians and equipment but the vast majority of staff do not get paid.

Rose Jackson-Nichols, Nars fundraising manager, said the requests for support from the NHS continued to grow.

"Like everyone else, our costs are continuing to go up and our call responses are going up," she said.

"When we started we were going out to under 1,000 calls a year. We're now going to over 2,000 calls a year, and that figure will continue to rise as our team grows and the need for the NHS continues to grow."

Ms Jackson-Nichols said the charity appreciated it was getting more difficult for people to make cash donations, but she said the donations of skills and time was just as welcome.

Medical student Konran Le is gaining valuable experience working for Nars while he completes his studies

Craig Smith is a volunteer paramedic with Nars.

He said: "A lot of people ask 'Why do you do it?' Well, the reason why I do it is because it's good to give something back and it's good to help people, and I don't mind doing it in my spare time.

"And I suppose it's so important that as a charity it's got the money to keep going to enable people like me to give up their time [and] give [us] the resources [we] need to actually go along to these calls."