The Victorian Premier, John Brumby, “unveiled” publicly accessible defibrillators at the Southern Cross station in Melbourne on 6 January 2008. Australia has been relatively slow in the take-up of defibrillators as part of the non-professional first aid role. Partly this was due to the initial expense of each unit but also because workplace first aid legislation took some time to accommodate technology.
In most States of Australia, this was exacerbated by the emphasis on allocating first aid resources on the basis of need rather than a prescriptive basis and, anyway, how can you gauge where people will have heart attacks?
SafetyAtWorkBlog is wary about relying on technology to solve problems simply because it seems simpler. In the long-term, technology can be become cumbersome, unnecessarily expensive to maintain and often increasingly unreliable. It is suggested that a cost/benefit exercise of the new defibrillators in Southern Cross Station would show them to be an unnecessary expense. Direct cause and effect in terms of first aid is difficult to quantify. But then again, according to the Premier’s media statement:
“In the 2007/08 financial year, Ambulance Victoria responded to 133 emergency cases at Southern Cross Station, including five cardiac arrest incidents.”
Defibrillators were obviously not applied as quickly in those incidents as can be in the future but for those first aiders in this blog’s readership the following statistic can be quite useful.
“Victoria has the best cardiac arrest survival rate in Australia, with 52 per cent of patients arriving alive at hospital.”
Let’s hope that these defibrillators will stop the Southern Cross Station from being a “terminal”.