South Coast First Aid's Greg White hopes the Shoalhaven will take the lead in the roll out of portable defibrillators to public areas in NSW.
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More than 2,500 Automatic External Defibrillators will be delivered to public spaces including community sports clubs, licensed sporting clubs, sports organisations associated with schools, churches, universities, and councils over the next four years.
In a move lauded by South Coast First Aid's Greg White, ClubGRANTS NSW has promised to subsidise costs by up to 50 per cent, and also provide training and maintenance support.
A defibrillator is a small, portable device designed to deliver a controlled electrical shock to a person experiencing cardiac arrest.
Australian media mogul Kerry Packer was resuscitated with a defibrillator in 1990 after suffering a heart attack in Sydney. After recovering, Mr Packer donated a large sum to the New South Wales Ambulance Service in order to fit all of its ambulances with portable defibrillators.
However, the defibrillators that are making their way into the public arena today have improved since that time. They are specifically designed with visual or verbal instructions, which allows non-medical and people without first aid training to use them.
For every minute that goes past without a defibrillator your chance of survival drops by about seven to 10 per cent.
- Greg White, South Coast First Aid
“It won't allow you to hurt anybody, it won't let you do anything wrong. The machine does everything for you. You turn the machine on and if it instructs you to shock the patient then that's what we do,” he said.
It takes between seven and ten minutes for an ambulance to reach the scene of a heart attack or cardiac arrest, according to Mr White. He hopes grant funding will spur community organisations to purchase their own defibrillator.
“Having defibrillators out in the public is so import because (although) we have a sensational ambulance service ... the statistics have proven that for every minute that goes past without a defibrillator your chance of survival drops by about seven to 10 per cent. So for survival rates to increase greatly we need to get a defibrillator there in the first five minutes,” he said.
“We run a program called Heart Smart Shoalhaven, where we try to increase the public's access to defibrillators. Because we're a very coastal area, with communities that are spread out, we're trying to get them into all the public areas.
“We would love to see Shoalhaven take the lead in this campaign for NSW,” Mr White said.
Applications close on Wednesday, December 20. Visit sport.nsw.gov.au/clubs/grants for more information.
