BRITAIN'S longest-serving paramedic has retired after 42 years of service – during which time he has saved an estimated 11,000 lives.

Since first qualifying in 1966, John Spindler, 64, has responded to nearly 42,000 emergencies – around a quarter of which were life-threatening.

He qualified by doing a St John Ambulance evening course for just one week but has since mastered an array of modern life-saving gadgets.

Mr Spindler said the biggest change during his career was in the type of call-outs he attended.

He said: "When I first started, calling an ambulance was seen as a last resort – it was really only serious things that we were called out for.

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"But we get some ridiculous calls now. People rely too much on the services and use them all the time, sometimes for things as minor as a broken finger.

"We didn't see so many drunks when I first started, and those we did were always men. Nowadays it's the women who have to be taken to hospital. We never used to get called out to drug overdoses when I started either.

"Now, the addicts are so desperate – they can be unconscious and blue but when we've resuscitated them they still swear at you for ruining their high."

Mr Spindler qualified when he lived in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, by taking a St John Ambulance training course that took just six evening sessions followed by an exam.

It covered basic first aid – including putting on bandages, putting people into the recovery position and on to stretchers.

His first ambulance was a J-Type Bedford painted in the black-and- white livery St John Ambulance.

He recalled: "There were no sat-navs so we just used maps – if we were going to a village at night we used to tell people to keep their light on so we could find the right house. That wouldn't work these days."

In the early days his job was mainly to transport injured people to hospital, rather than actually treating them.

But he remembers attending some horrific road accidents over the years – particularly in the early days when, he says, car crashes were much more severe than they are now.

"In those days, if there was a road accident it would be a lot worse and there would be a lot more injuries, with no seatbelts and no safety glass.

"Today you might get one person trapped and everyone else would walk out, but not back then."

Several horrific crashes are etched in his memory – one in 1993 when four people burnt to death in an overturned car near Yeovil and he had to recover the charred remains.

He attended a similar horror 10 years later in Somerset in 2002 where three generations of the same family were killed in a smash on the A303 Wincanton Bypass.

But Mr Spindler has many positive memories too. "I've also delivered five babies on the job, usually where people are having their second or third babies and haven't left enough time to get to the hospital," he said.

He also remembers the breakthrough introduction of mouth-to- mouth resuscitation in the 1960s.

He said: "The first time I used mouth-to-mouth was incredible. Before then we had to lie people face down on their front and pull their arms back and forth behind them to open their chest.

"A woman had collapsed on the seafront at Weston-super-Mare.

"We took her into the ambulance and tried mouth-to-mouth for the first time, having been trained on it a month before. When it worked it felt like magic."

Mr Spindler decided to stop work a year before the official retirement age of 65 as he has paid off his mortgage and wants to spend more time with his family. He has four children – Juliet, 42, Louise, 40, Carolyn, 38, Natalie, 26 – and four grandchildren, Amy, 17, Matthew, 15, Timothy, 13, and Tabatha, 4.

Now living and working in Yeovil, Somerset, he said he was finding it hard to keep pace with the changing technology and daily routine.

"In the job, there is a lot of lifting and you don't slow down," he said. "The pace is the same, whether you are 24 or 64. When I started there were about 30 different pieces of equipment and we used to carry a little first aid satchel. Now there are around 500.

"But I'm quite proud of what I have done and think I have been very lucky to be able to carry it on this long."

Mr Spindler reckons he responded to an average of 21 call-outs a week during his career – between seven and 10 on a typical day shift and six or seven on a night shift. This equates to 987 emergencies a year and 41,454 callouts during his career.

An average of 27 per cent of 999 calls are life-threatening, according to his former employer South West Ambulance Service NHS Trust, meaning he has helped save around 11,000 lives over his career.

He said: "There is a tinge of sadness in a sense, but I feel I am going out at the top. I have done my career and it is the right time to call it a day."

Mr Spindler may be retiring but his family's involvement in the ambulance service is far from finished.

His daughter Natalie, 26, is following in his footsteps and joined the ambulance service around three years ago.

Source: westernmorningnews.co.uk

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