The importance of defibrillators in saving lives was brought home to the coxswain of the Bembridge lifeboat recently when he became involved in helping assist a man who had fallen in the street on the Isle of Wight.
Guy Willing, who only became coxswain at Bembridge 2 months ago, was about to enjoy a rare afternoon off when he became stuck in traffic on Foreland Road in the Village.
On realising the hold-up was because someone had collapsed on the pavement, he left his vehicle and found a group of people carrying out CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) and using a defibrillator to try and get the man’s heart started.
Guy explained:
‘You can’t walk away from that.
“I said would you like me to have a go and I carried on with the compressions while another person at the scene did the air. I just did what I was trained to do”.
Guy and the other members of the public at the scene used the defibrillator to shock the man 4 times before the paramedics arrived on the scene and he was taken to hospital.
“I wasn’t saving lives at sea, but was an extremely small cog in a group of about four or five people, I gave a bit of assistance in a small way”, Guy said.
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The demonstration of the effectiveness of defibrillators in saving lives came at a pertinent time for Bembridge Lifeboat Station. The crew are currently raising funds to buy a defibrillator machine which will be placed on the outside of the lifeboat station and available for use to the general public.
John Keyworth, Operations Manager at Bembridge RNLI adds:
”It just goes to show how important defibrillators are – and shows why the crew are carrying out their own fund-raising to get a machine on the outside of the station:
“We need to raise £1750 and we are nearly there.
”Using defibrillators, which give a high energy electric shock to the heart, have been shown to be very effective when treating people who have gone into cardiac arrest”.
