Carrying a defibrillator

Commuting, Day rides, Audax, Incidents, etc.
sore thumb
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Joined: 7 Jan 2007, 10:27am

Re: Carrying a defibrillator

Post by sore thumb »

I would have a hard time getting my defib on the back of the bike........

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661-Pete
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Location: Sussex

Re: Carrying a defibrillator

Post by 661-Pete »

Something just jogged my memory.
When I was in my teens, I recall going out for a walk with my father, just the two of us, in a lonely stretch of the Surrey Hills. My father suddenly asked me "what would you do if I suddenly collapsed?". I was pretty taken aback, I can tell you, I think I just mumbled something like "I don't know..." I assumed it was a hypothetical question. But I was scared. I knew my father did suffer bouts of angina.

Two or three years later, my father did collapse with a cardiac arrest. I wasn't with him at the time: he was at the wheel of his car with his brother as passenger. No-one on the scene, certainly not my uncle, knew how to administer resuscitation, let alone CPR. The ambulance service in those days merely did a 'scoop-and-run', leaving the hospital to try to revive him. My father was dead on arrival. Possibly the proximity of a defibrillator might have saved him, if such things had been known in those days (early 1970s). But even today, where would one have been found? It happened on a residential street, no shops nearby.

One's life story is full of "what if?"s. It doesn't do to dwell on them.
Suppose that this room is a lift. The support breaks and down we go with ever-increasing velocity.
Let us pass the time by performing physical experiments...
--- Arthur Eddington (creator of the Eddington Number).
TonyR
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Re: Carrying a defibrillator

Post by TonyR »

661-Pete wrote:But even today, where would one have been found? It happened on a residential street, no shops nearby.


That is a serious point. I am sure there are defibrillators installed around where I live but I haven't a clue where they are. It would be a bit of an initiative test to find one in an emergency and I'm not sure there would be time to do that.
Psamathe
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Joined: 10 Jan 2014, 8:56pm

Re: Carrying a defibrillator

Post by Psamathe »

TonyR wrote:
661-Pete wrote:But even today, where would one have been found? It happened on a residential street, no shops nearby.


That is a serious point. I am sure there are defibrillators installed around where I live but I haven't a clue where they are. It would be a bit of an initiative test to find one in an emergency and I'm not sure there would be time to do that.

I thought the emergency services will tell you where the nearest one is when you call in an emergency. i.e. they ask you where you are and then say "Get somebody to go to ... where there is an emergency defib". Maybe I'm wrong on this but something I'd just assumed. Maybe they can only be used by trained people so need to be "collected" with somebody that knows how they work.

I know in our village we have a "1st Responder" person who is also St John's and the Parish Council wanted ne in the village but were refused as the individual was something like 1 mile from the geographic centre of the village (despite the village being very "distributed" and she was pretty well in the middle of the "population").

Ian
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John1054
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Location: Sunshine Coast

Re: Carrying a defibrillator

Post by John1054 »

Several of the villages in Cumbria have defibrillator machines installed outside the village halls, in locked cabinets, that the ambulance control centre give you the code to unlock the box, when you dial 999. They are all "idiot proofed" operation - the machine tells you exactly what to do & when. Most areas have first responder teams that usually arrive before the nearest ambulance, who have all the skills to preserve life. Not fool-proof, but re-assuring in such a rural area.
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