Recruitment
“For all his work towards getting defibrillators installed in train stations around the network. Also all the charities work and money he has raised to this cause.“
“Steve’s son Alex sadly passed away suddenly in 2016 due to Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome (SADS). SADS is caused by a disturbance in the heart’s rhythm, of which there are many causes, despite the person not having any physical heart disease. The British Heart Foundation (BHF) estimates about 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests occur every year in the UK, and just one in 10 people survive. Yet access to an automated-external defibrillator within 8 minutes of a cardiac arrest can increase the chances of survival by 80%
Steve has worked tirelessly, setting up The Alex Wardle Foundation in Alex’s memory to help spread awareness of SADS and to hopefully stop other families from going through what his family did. With Steve’s hard work, more than 154 defibrillators will be rolled out across SWR stations, making all customers safer as a result.
Steve has campaigned and worked to spread awareness of SADS since the passing of his son Alex both at SWR and in the local communities. All of Steve’s spare time is spent carrying out charity work and getting things in place to help push the message out there about SADS. Steve and the charity have held numerous fundraisers and helped out at a number of sporting events with defibrillators in case of a medical emergency.
Steve managed to get his colleagues involved with the charity and when the nominations for SWR charity partners came about he managed to get enough colleagues to nominate The Alex Wardle Foundation that the charity became a SWR charity partner.
Since The Alex Wardle Foundation has been a charity partner, Steve has worked with the business to help push forward the importance of defibrillators at stations and as of this summer SWR has nearly completed the rollout of 154 at our staffed stations. To coincide with this rollout, Steve has worked with another charity to carry out defib confidence training which over 800 colleagues have attended so far.
Further to the main stations scheme, an additional 8 of the same AED units were procured for train crew depots around the network which are away from the main areas of stations where defibrillators were installed, so that lives could also potentially be saved in those locations too.
As a result of our initiative, the local community council around Malden Manor station have procured the same units and cabinets for use on some of their community buildings, and station locations thereby expanding the benefits of this scheme further out into communities that SWR serves.
One of Steve’s main wishes was to have a train named after Alex and so in March of this year we saw the loco 444023 unveiled with The Alex Wardle Foundation name and logo. This unveiling with the announcement of the defibrillator roll out made it onto local and national news and Steve was even interviewed by BBC Radio Surrey to talk about the charity and the rollout.
This is a strong example of a rail colleague taking their own hardships and passionately innovating to create something positive which benefits the whole rail community.“
“Steve is an excellent trainer and I support his charity. I think he is doing a wonderful Job“
“Just wanted to say thank you to you and everyone at Rail Media for Saturday, it was a great night and even better we came back with an award!”
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