Welcome jolts

OPINION: Shocking statistics aren't necessarily bad ones, writes The Southland Times in an editorial.

A prime example is to be found in the story about an Invercargill moviegoer who collapsed at the counter of Reading Cinema on Saturday night.

There are worse places than a cinema to drop with a heart attack, if only because the old "is there a doctor in the house?" call can go out.

This time the victim had the good fortune that a nurse was nearby. More implausibly, still, the cinema had its own defibrillator and staff who knew how to use it.

This is a consequence of one of the better Invercargill Licensing Trust initiatives, in conjunction with St John, putting more than 50 of the emergency zappers into the community.

In other words, Invercargill is pretty much the best place in the country to keel over with a heart attack.

Not only are the odds just about unprecedentedly good that a nearby venue – typically shopping outlets, sports clubs, libraries, swimming pools, entertainment venues and transport hubs – will have one, but more than 500 people out there have been trained how to use them.

It was an initiative championed by ILT Foundation manager Ann Eustace, and the benefits have been undeniable.

Among the most high-profile cases so far was that of Georgetown Bowling Club greenkeeper Russell Morrison, who collapsed while mowing the club's green and was revived using one of the defibrillators, which had been donated just six weeks earlier.

Although the coverage for Invercargill is particularly good, other parts of Southland outside the ILT area have hardly been idle in providing these lifesavers for their own communities, and even their workforces.

The Community Trust of Southland has helped the cause and the Mataura Licensing Trust has ensured the devices have been placed throughout its catchment. Again, the commitment went further than that, by paying to ensure that up to 10 people in each area would be trained in the use of the 18 devices.

RJD Fyffe wrote to this newspaper in August 2008 to attribute his life to Alliance Group management placing defibrillators in the workplace.

None of this represents an indulgence. Typically, 3800 people suffered a cardiac arrest each year in New Zealand. Nobody could deny that defibrillators represent, almost literally, ambulances at the bottom of the cliff, but those short, controlled electric shocks to the heart, stopping the muscle's uncontrollable quivers, continue to save lives.

Even so, it would be folly to assume that one of these devices will be produced, and by a skilled user, at every instance it's needed. It would be a sorry consequence, indeed, if southerners became even a tad blase about the need to know how to perform CPR should the need arise.

And that means showing up at any of the host of good old first aid courses out there. It does not mean thinking ourselves virtuous for paying close attention to all those television dramas, because the practices there just don't stack up.

Most of us understand that Mr Bean's trick of attaching jumper cables to a collapsed man's nipples isn't best practice – but how many get it that the actors pretending to administer CPR sometimes get things deliberately wrong. they might bend their elbows during compressions because doing it the right way might, en route to keeping the victim alive, cause broken bones or some heart trauma. So don't trust telly; trust real instructors.

- © Fairfax NZ News