‘THEY SAVE LIVES’
How AEDs are making a difference
Little did Rev. Diane Robinson know a lunch conversation about AEDs would ultimately save her life.
Her story of survival goes back to May 2015.
Robinson, a minister at St. James United Church, was lunching with a member of her congregation who was a registered nurse and they got talking about AEDs.
“I have no idea why,” Robinson said. “But we got excited about the idea of having one in our church. It’s a very busy building with lots of public coming and going.”
The discussion prompted her lunch partner to put forward a proposal to the church council that it purchase an AED for the building. The price tag of nearly $2,000 was daunting for the church, and various models were examined, but the proposal was approved. The device was installed in late October.
Eight weeks later, Robinson was at the church setting up for Christmas Eve when she started getting dizzy. Fortunately, Rev. Laura Sundberg was with her when she went into cardiac arrest.
Sundberg kept her cool and called 911. The dispatcher asked if there was an AED in the church.
“Laura said yes and she was told to get it,” Robinson said. “It told her to press the button to administer the shock and she also did CPR and kept me going until the medical professionals arrived.
“The AED was part of my chain of survival, and certainly Laura is, and I would suggest that my congregation member with whom I had the initial conversation is part of my chain of survival.”
Well into her recovery, Robinson asked to meet the 911 dispatcher.
“It turns out that Laura worked with the dispatcher’s father, who was a United Church minister when she was a student minister in Ontario,” Robinson said. “It’s a small world.”
After she had a defibrillator implanted, Robinson returned to her ministry at St. James.
“I pass by the AED every day and I say a little thank you,” she said.
More than 900 AEDs in Regina and area are registered with the National AED Registry, which links to 911 dispatch, said Amber Gorman, co-ordinator of the Public Access Defibrillator (PAD) program in Regina.
When an AED is registered, the PAD program gets a GPS location or street address and can monitor all of the active AEDs in and around Regina on a huge computer screen.
“When 911 dispatch gets a phone call saying there is a cardiac arrest, they hit an AED link button, and a computer-automated call-out will call the responders listed and let them know right away that an AED is required at an address,” Gorman said. “It works faster than a human dispatcher.”
Meanwhile, EMS is on its way.
“There is no other PAD program in the province that’s run like ours,” Gorman said. “Our PAD program is very progressive.”
For instance, other programs in Saskatchewan can’t track AEDs or link with 911.
The goal of the Regina program is to increase survival rates for outof-hospital cardiac arrests.
AEDs can be found in numerous locations such as elementary and high schools, the University of Regina, some dentists’ offices, some businesses, all Saskatchewan parks, community rinks, most malls and many gyms.
Interestingly, very few are found in physicians’ offices.
“If you can get an AED on a person in that three-or-four-minute window, combined with compressions, you have an 80-percent chance of survival,” Gorman said. “If you do just compressions alone, they’re saying there’s about a 30-per-cent chance. If you wait for 10 minutes with no action, there’s less than a one-per-cent chance of survival.”
The AED is simple to use.
“It will prompt you to expose the person’s chest, to put on the electrode pads and then it will prompt you not to touch the patient,” Gorman said. “It will say, ‘shock advised’ or ‘no shock advised’ and then it will prompt you to do CPR.”
When an AED is used at a PAD site, the unit is swapped for a loaner.
“We’ll take their AED and do a download onto the computer and we can see exactly, from start to finish what happened — how good the compressions were, when the shocks were delivered and what rhythm the patient was in,” Gorman said. “We can give that information to the cardiologist as well.”
Robinson is thankful the AED was close at hand when she needed it.
“I honestly believe there’s angels among us ... and I’m happy to speak about AEDs because they save lives,” she said.
If you can get an AED on a person in that threeor-four-minute window, combined with compressions, you have an 80-percent chance of survival.