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Lathrop will place 6 AEDs around town to save lives
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If you’re planning on having a heart attack in Lathrop in the coming months, there might be a few places you don’t want to stray too far from.
It could just end up saving your life.
On Monday the Lathrop City Council gave its blessing to a program that will place six Automated External Defribulators – machines that will be placed strategically throughout the city in an effort to give both employees and residents alike the best chance of surviving cardiac arrest.
According to industry statistics, the use of an AED when combined with cardiopulmonary resuscitation may increase the likelihood of survival by 75 percent or more. Likewise, for every one minute that defribulation is not delivered in somebody suffering cardiac arrest, the survival rate decreases between 7 and 10 percent – every minute.
And when the machines come in by the end of the month and the city trains its employees on how to use them efficiently, people at the following locations – The Lathrop Community Center, the Lathrop Senior Center Lobby, the Lathrop Generations Center, the City Hall lobby, the city corporation yard and Lathrop Police Services – will stand the best chance of survival.
City Staff worked closely with the Lathrop Manteca Fire District to ensure that the units purchased – manufactured by Physio-Control – are inline with those already in use on standard emergency medical services engines and trucks throughout the district.
And thanks to the relative ease at which the units operate, somebody with no training can follow the simple instructions contained within – placing the paddles on the appropriate portions of the body and measuring automatically to determine whether there is an appropriate sinus rhythm. The machine itself will deliver a shock if necessary, and will order anybody within earshot of the box to move away from both it and the person being shocked as a safety precaution.
Because a Good Samaritan Law already exists, those who would use the boxes in conjunction with the appropriate protocols would be legally protected regardless of the outcome of the situation.
According to City Attorney Salvador Navarrete, as long as a reasonable person follows the standard protocol for such devices, the city itself would be off the hook for any additional legal ramifications.
AED Machines have become commonplace in heavily-attended public locales like shopping malls and airports and are constructed with the ease of use of an untrained user in mind.
When coupled with advances in CPR treatment – like the most recent edict to bypass the breaths that used to offset compressions and instead focus solely on delivering compressions to the heart – it only further improves the odds that the person suffering cardiac arrest will pull through to the other side.
If the system goes well, the opportunity exists that Lathrop could add more AED machines at other locations and even offer citywide training sessions.