24th March 2016
Once a week, Juliet Burgess-Ray visits her local chip shop. But rather than picking up a saveloy and butty, she’s checking in on a defibrillator.
“I have always been interested in anything medical and helping people, so when the opportunity came up to organise a public access defibrillator for our village, Cottesmore, I jumped at the chance of being involved,” she explains.
Cottesmore is one of the nearly 1,900 sites in the UK which now hosts a public access defibrillator. Defibrillators are small, often briefcase-sized devices housed in yellow boxes, which can deliver an electric shock to a person in cardiac arrest, helping them to regain a normal heartbeat rhythm.
And they are effective, according to St John Ambulance. If someone has a cardiac arrest and both CPR and a defibrillator are used within three minutes, the chance of survival could be as high as 70%. The medical equipment is increasingly being installed in public attractions, and rural locations around the UK.
Some of the more surprising places where the lifesaving equipment has been installed include in the cubicle of a public toilet in Northamptonshire, St Paul’s Cathedral and Tintagel Castle.
Read the full feature here - Emergency phone box could save lives!