New ambulance app literally a lifesaver
OFF-DUTY nurse Eden Roney was watching Netflix at a Little River house when she became aware that a man was suffering a heart attack just 400m away.
The 24-year-old immediately stopped what she was doing to rush to the man’s aid.
“I just changed out of my pyjama pants in the car on the way there and threw a pair of thongs on and that was it,” Ms Roney told the Geelong Advertiser.
As she arrived at the scene, the Little River football oval, Ms Roney said she instantly realised the man, aged in his 60s, needed urgent help.
“He was just lying on the ground,” she explained.
“The people around him thought they didn’t need to do CPR because he was breathing — but it was agonal breathing, the brain’s last effort to stay alive.
“I said ‘No we really need to keep doing this’.
“As a nurse I knew he wasn’t breathing, I knew I needed someone to start doing compressions again.”
As she held the man’s head to support his airway, Ms Roney instructed a team of six bystanders to administer CPR and defibrillation.
With the man close to death, Ms Roney said the group managed to get him breathing before paramedics arrived.
“At the time I honesty couldn’t think of anything other than what we had to do — saving that man’s life,” she said.
“I coached them through it while I was focusing on the airway, because the airway is quite difficult to maintain.
“We were able to actually stop doing compressions after about 10 minutes because we got him stable enough to be transferred to hospital.”
Ms Roney became aware of the incident, which happened on Good Friday last year, through Ambulance Victoria’s GoodSAM Responder App.
She said the man received “crucial” minutes of extra treatment because of the app, which alerts people when a 000 call is made for a nearby suspected cardiac arrest.
The app was trialled in 2018 to health professionals and first aid-trained colleagues before expanding last year to include anyone over the age of 18 familiar with CPR and first aid.
Ms Roney attended the official Geelong launch of the app on Wednesday, where Ambulance Victoria recruited an additional 50 people to become GoodSAM responders.