Know it by heart: 111 saves lives
Woman tells of phone conversation that ended in triple bypass surgery Location system helping
Three numbers saved Susan Garrard’s life — 111. The Invercargill social worker put her continual exhaustion down to possible glandular fever or a virus, her jaw pain down to toothache and hot flushes down to pre-menopause, but she couldn’t explain her shortness of breath.
It wasn’t until she phoned her GP to make an appointment in March last year that the nurse told her to dial 111 for an ambulance. She was 44, had just suffered a heart attack and was rushed by helicopter to Dunedin Hospital for triple bypass surgery.
“I was typically symptomatic of having angina. I was dismissing everything and my heart was the last thing on my mind,” says Garrard, who lost both her father and older sister to heart attacks at a young age.
“If there is anything going on that you don’t recognise as being normal, don’t dismiss it,” is her message.
Dr Gerry Devlin, a cardiologist at Waikato Hospital, says Garrard is one of the lucky people who make it to hospital after suffering a heart attack, where these days the chances of survival are about 95 per cent.
Half a century ago, the odds were 40 per cent to 50 per cent.
“One in two people we never get to see,” says Devlin, referring to people who have a heart attack and never make it to hospital.
Devlin, director of the Heart Foundation, is fronting this month’s Heart Attack Awareness campaign, stressing the life-saving importance of calling 111 and knowing the signs of a heart attack.
In its third year, it features a multiaward winning television advertise- ment showing a man in the background quietly having a heart attack, while others give a “Hollywood” performance in the foreground.
“It’s about trying to tell Kiwis to take chest pain seriously,” says the doctor, who urges everyone who has prolonged chest discomfort, breathlessness, feeling sick or sweaty to call the emergency 111 number. “Speed is critical,” says Devlin. If you call an ambulance, staff can start treatment straight away and reduce the chances of permanent damage to the heart. People do not join the dots and seek medical help quickly, says Devlin.
Recent Heart Foundation research showed 80 per cent of Kiwis, aged 45-plus, cannot identify all of the major heart attack symptoms and only 20 per cent recognise nausea is a common symptom.
Even more worrying is more than 40 per cent over 45 would not call 111 immediately if they experience heart attack symptoms.
The top reasons behind delaying that call include: “Don’t want to waste people’s time if it’s not a heart attack”, “I think it will go away by itself” and, “It’s probably not a heart attack, the symptoms aren’t quite right, I am healthy”. A new caller location system for calls to 111 from cellphones has already made a difference in the two months it has been up and running.
The system gives emergency services the probable location of a cellphone caller when they dial 111, enabling police, fire and ambulance services to respond more quickly.
“The new system has been vital in helping to identify the location of callers in instances where the caller hasn’t been able to speak, where the call has been cut off before the operator could get more information about the caller’s location or where the caller doesn’t know their exact whereabouts,” said Police Minister Paula Bennett.
“The system has been used to get help to an injured person on a farm, a motorcycle crash victim, people who are distressed or potentially suicidal, people experiencing family violence, a person who had spotted a fire in a rural area, and people experiencing medical emergencies.”
Communications Minister Simon Bridges said it was great to hear how it was helping emergency service providers improve public safety.
The system saw New Zealand leading the way in emergency response systems, alongside Britain and other European countries, he said.
“Since [it] was introduced, more than 145,000 genuine 111 calls have been made to emergency services and around 20 per cent of these calls involved operators using the system to help them get more accurate information about a caller’s location.”
But although the system was a critical tool to help identify where cell calls were coming from, it was still very important for people to tell emergency services operators where they were.