The scheme, funded by health and wellbeing provider, Westfield Health, have approved the purchase of a defibrillator for Concorde BGW. This will be a iPAD SP1 package from WEL Medical and will be registered with the Yorkshire Ambulance Service following installation allowing public access in the event of an emergency.
Details of the location of the Defib will be added to The Circuit – The National Defibrillator Network - a database which connects defibrillators to NHS ambulance services across the UK, so that in those crucial moments when someone is having a cardiac arrest, they can be accessed quickly to help more people survive.
Dave Capper, CEO at Westfield Health, said: “Every second counts when it comes to cardiac arrest, which can happen to anyone at any time, and the only chance of survival is having access to a defibrillator nearby. Each minute that passes without help can cause an increased risk of fatality. Having a defibrillator within distance is necessary to save lives, which is why as a company, we’re passionate about donating these lifesaving devices to communities and partners we serve.”
This publicly accessible kit will play a vital service in helping to save lives when people suffer a cardiac arrest, which can happen to anyone. Less than 1 in 10 people in the UK survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Two big factors that play a part in this are 1) there aren’t enough people prepared to perform CPR when someone has a cardiac arrest, 2) there aren’t enough defibrillators.
Robert Ellis, Health and Safety Manager at Concorde BGW Group says “Here at Concorde BGW we look after our staff in a variety of different ways and the latest initiative was to secure a donation of an AED Defibrillator by partnering with Westfield Health.
We recognise that these units are vital in saving lives and are often now seen in wider public spaces. We identified that the closest public available unit to where our head office is, is between 0.5 and 1 mile away depending on whether retrieval is by foot or car. This means that it would be between 5 and 12 minutes to retrieve the unit not taking into account the time it would take to look for its location.
Given that our offices are situated in the heart of a residential area, it was crucial for us to consider this in our planning not only for our own staff but situating the unit outside our premises so it can be easily accessed by the local community in the event of an emergency.
We often hear that for every minute without CPR and defibrillation can reduce a victim’s survival rate by 7 to 10 per cent so having one of these units in our local area helps us as a business to give something back to our local community.”
Robert has arranged for the Community Resilience Team from the Yorkshire Ambulance Service to deliver familiarisation training to six people from the team at Concorde on the 25th July 2022. The training will give them the capability and confidence to use the defibrillator in the event of an emergency.
We would like to thank all involved in securing these services showing how much they care about the safety of staff, residents, and visitors, in particular team members Kenny and Angie, who facilitated the installation of the unit.
