Tragic story prompts education in the use of defibrillators.
Tragic story prompts education in the use of defibrillators.
A story that was recently highlighted in the news was that of a 16-year-old boy who died in Canada in May last year of cardiac arrest while an AED lay unused at his side.
Brock Ruether collapsed at school during volleyball practice and although the school AED was located by members of staff, they were too scared to use it.
Brock’s mother Kim Ruether has since been campaigning to ensure the public are educated in the use of an AED to prevent this from happening again. She has been working with the Heart & Stroke Foundation among other emergency and health officials in Alberta, Canada to get more AEDs into schools and to train people in how to use them.
This reluctance was also highlighted in a recent article published in the British Medical Journal following research conducted by Aseem Malhotra and Roby Rakhit, cardiologists from the Royal Free Hospital in London, who recently published a survey on out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in the UK.
The aim of the survey was to see how aware the general public were of cardiac arrest and how prepared they were to help in such a situation.
According to the results of the survey only 1 in 13 (0.076%) of people felt confident enough to perform CPR and use an AED in an emergency.
The survey compared survival rates in the UK for cardiac arrest, of between 2% and 12%, with those in places like Seattle where it is as high as 56% due to the level of training citizens receive from an early age.
Malhotra and Rakhit concluded that training and greater access to AEDs will help to improve survival rates from cardiac arrest in the UK and believe that emergency life support skills should be added to the school curriculum.