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A suburban Palm Beach community recently created a volunteer defibrillator team, buying automated external defibrillators (AEDs) and training residents to use them in case a cardiac emergency strikes their neighbors, mate or someone close to them. While local emergency response teams carry AEDs, fire-rescue officials say residents can often get to the victim more quickly.
"By the time someone recognizes the cardiac arrest and calls 911, the fire-rescue team then has to drive through traffic," explains Delray Beach Fire-Rescue Division Chief Robert Moreland. "The typical response time is five to seven minutes."
Neighborhood Heart Watch readers know that widespread access to defibrillators can dramatically improve response time and could double the chances of surviving sudden cardiac arrest. Victims must be treated immediately because the heart has stopped working altogether. The rate of survival drops each minute, and victims can suffer brain damage after six minutes.
About 160 volunteers in the 928-home Cascades subdivision have joined the neighborhood defibrillation team. They sleep in their clothes with a special cell phone close at hand. Other subdivisions in Palm Beach County have defibrillators stored at clubhouses and tennis courts or passed daily among volunteers on 24-hour shifts.
The trend has accelerated since the Florida state legislature passed the Cardiac Arrest Survival Act to protect those using defibrillators from lawsuits.
"My feeling now is that defibrillators are the 'in' thing," said Manny Myerson, codirector of the Cascades' defibrillator team. "They're so much the 'in' thing that a plaintiff's attorney will probably tell you there's more risk for not having a defibrillator than for having one."
More than 680 people nationwide die daily from cardiac arrest. We urge our readers to help save lives by placing AEDs in their communities.
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