What would you do if someone near you at work, at the gym, in a shopping centre or your local club had a heart attack? Each year more than 30,000 Australians will have a heart attack so it is a situation many of us will face.
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Many of you will say, I will call an ambulance and let them take care of it. Well, here is a sobering thought. Seventy-two out of the 80 or so Australians who have a cardiac arrest today will die. In most cases, death will occur within 10 minutes of the onset of the heart attack. With ambulance response times getting longer because of traffic congestion and other issues, you need to react quickly if this person has a chance of survival. An immediate response with CPR will help increase the victim's chances of survival but the availability of a defibrillator will increase their chances threefold. About 86 per cent of so-called heart attacks involve ventricular fibrillation. In simple terms this means that the victim's heart is fluttering chaotically and cannot pump blood efficiently around the body. If blood cannot flow to the brain, it becomes starved of oxygen and the person loses consciousness in seconds.
Within four minutes things begin to break down. The first thing to be affected is the brain. This starts in two to four minutes. Next is the heart itself, within 15 minutes. Action is needed very quickly and you simply cannot wait for an ambulance. The only thing that can get the heart to begin beating properly again is a shock from a defibrillator.
You may say, "I am not a doctor, there is no way I can use one of these devices". Wrong! You do not need to be medically qualified to use a public access defibrillator. This is why the word "public" is used. If you suspect that someone is having a heart attack you simply grab the defib, if one is available, turn it on and follow the verbal and visual instructions. These defibrillators will automatically assess if the person needs a shock and if so, deliver it at the right time and the right level. It will not deliver a shock if it is not required. You cannot accidentally shock someone.
Bottom line, defibrillators save lives but we need access to them. As a bare minimum, we need to place them everywhere you find large numbers of people. These places are not hard to work out. With this and public education, many lives will be saved.
Response by: Harry Packer, Schiller Australia
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