Edmond Town Hall Acquires Lifesaving Device

 By Andrew Gorosko

The town has installed a potentially lifesaving device in Edmond Town Hall, which it hopes it never has to use.

An automatic external heart defibrillator (AED), a compact bright yellow device in a black fabric cover, now sits in a wall-mounted case in the inner lobby of the building, near the multiple doors to the building’s theater.

Five town hall workers last week received instruction from the American Red Cross on how to use the defibrillator to aid heart emergency victims. The workers also received training in cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR), rescue breathing, and helping a choking victim.

Receiving the instruction were Jan Andras, Marcy Becker, Sharon Bowman, Clark Kathan and Tom Mahoney. Natalie Dos Santos of the Red Cross provided the training October 26 at the Newtown Volunteer Ambulance Corps garage.

Besides the normal flow of traffic to municipal offices, Edmond Town Hall contains a heavily used movie theater, gymnasium, and social function room.

Having an AED available in the building can mean that a heart emergency victim receives immediate help, even before an ambulance arrives.

If a heart emergency victim lacks a heartbeat, CPR is administered.

If the victim has an irregular heartbeat, the defibrillator is used to shock the erratically beating heart into a normal rhythm.

Based on the results of tests performed on the victim with the defibrillator, the defibrillator sounds basic voice commands telling its operator what to do for the victim. A defibrillation usually consists of a series of shocks to the heart.

Battery-operated AEDs deliver electric shocks to reestablish a normal heart rhythm in people who are suffering from ventricular fibrillation, the most common form of arrhythmia that causes cardiac arrest.

Ventricular fibrillation is a condition in which the heart’s electrical impulses suddenly become chaotic, often without warning, causing the heart to stop abruptly. Victims collapse and quickly lose consciousness. Death usually follows unless responders restore a normal heart rhythm within five to seven minutes, according to the American Heart Association.

Each minute of delay in returning the heart to its normal rhythm decreases the chances of survival by 10 percent. After as little as 10 minutes, very few resuscitation attempts are successful.

 More than 95 percent of Americans who suffer sudden cardiac arrest die before reaching the hospital, representing 250,000 deaths annually.

“Early defibrillation is the critical link in the cardiac arrest chain of survival – the only treatment to correct ventricular fibrillation. The sooner a heart can be restarted, the better the chances of recovery,” according to Nancy Nicol, of the heart association.

James Crouch is the chief dispatcher at Edmond Town Hall’s emergency communications center. Mr Crouch, who organized the project to install the AED in town hall, says he hopes that every public building in town eventually has an AED in place.

Mr Crouch hopes to increase the number of town hall employees trained in defibrillator use to provide a broader safety net to people who might suffer heart emergencies while in the building.

Besides Edmond Town Hall, a major local manufacturer has defibrillators in place. Kendro Laboratory Products, a Pecks Lane centrifuge manufacturer, which employs 400 people, has several defibrillators on hand.