Monday 23rd November 2015 – 11.05am – Chris Kowalik.
A paramedic area support officer based in Hereford has received his Queen’s medal for his work to help tackle the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone.
Mark Smith was deployed at the beginning of this year. He spent six weeks at a treatment centre in Kerry Town run by the charity Save the Children.
While he was there and, sweating heavily in a biohazard suit, he treated Ebola patients, or trained other volunteers in how to use the personal protective equipment so as not to catch the disease themselves.
Earlier this autumn, Mark received his medal in the post. It will accompany a number of other medals including those for his involvement in two Gulf Wars.
Pictures : West Midlands Ambulance Service
But he said, this medal is different: “I have a sense with this one that it’s more special in as much as – with a military campaign it’s ‘man versus man’ or, if you like ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. With this, it was man against the elements, against disease, making a difference to save man. So it was, in fact, ‘man’s HUMANITY to man.’”
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