Shrewsbury candidate comes to aid of fallen man
She may have been out and about on the campaign trail but when a call for a doctor went up on a town's busy high street one candidate was in the right place at the right time.
A man collapsed on Pride Hill, Shrewsbury's main shopping street, close to where Dr Laura Davies was campaigning as Labour's parliamentary candidate for the forthcoming general election – and to the surprise of onlookers she switched into medical mode to help the stricken man.
Dr Laura Davies is currently on maternity leave from her role as doctor at Birmingham's Queen Elizabeth Hospital, and is also running a campaign to become Shrewsbury and Atcham's next MP, with 12-week-old son Nicholas in tow.
With election day just around the corner, she said she and 15 Labour activists were out in force on Pride Hill yesterday.
She said: "We had a stall at the top of Pride Hill, we had started at about 10.45am and it was about 1pm when we were just about to pack up.
"I was standing chatting to various constituents who were asking me questions about the campaign, when somebody I'd just been talking to came back and said 'You're a doctor aren't you? There's someone over there who might need your help.'"
She said she could not go into detail of what exactly had happened due to patient confidentiality, only that a man had had an accident and collapsed in the busy high street.
"There's a limit to what you can do without your kit with you," she said, "But I did what I had to do until the emergency services came and took over.
"Everybody was very supportive, somebody looked after the baby, I directed somebody to call the emergency services, and somebody else unfolded a sleeping bag that they had with them to lay the man on."
She said it may have sounded dramatic, "but in reality I was just doing what I do every day".
Dr Davies is running against incumbent Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski, Green Emma Bullard, Liberal Democrat Hannah Fraser and Edward Higginbottom of UKIP.
