An emergency dispatcher named Colin Terry remembered that day when he received the call. He already knew what was happening, and the voice of a woman is already hysterical and panicking.
Timely intervention
Before the incident happened, an elementary school teacher Wendy Swain and students took a recess break. The children were playing and suddenly one of her students just collapse to the ground. Swain runs over to the student, and he looks very bad. The student had suffered a cardiac arrest. She immediately started calling emergency numbers.
The connection was very poor, and Terry had to ask Swain what had happened. Swain had to answer the dispatcher twice due to the poor connection. When the connection finally improved, Terry and Swain were able to talk calmly. Terry provided Swain the steps of providing CPR or cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the student.
Terry instructed Swain to let somebody look for a defibrillator. Meanwhile Swain was busy providing chest compressions on the student for at least 600 times until paramedics arrived in the area.
An AED or defibrillator never arrived but luckily the paramedics arrived in the area. They continued providing CPR on the student and immediately brought to the hospital for further treatment. The people in the hospital have no ideas why the student suffered cardiac arrest. The student made a full recovery.
According to Swain, despite the positive results, she believes that the student would have been given help earlier if the school have installed and an automated external defibrillator or an AED. An AED is portable devices that quickly diagnose life serious condition such as cardiac arrhythmias. This device sends electric shocks through the wall of the chest when the heart stops beating.
Furthermore, Swain said that if the defibrillator was available within the three to four minutes, I sent for it, the student would have been revived in half the time. Every second count after a cardiac arrest.
Since the incident, Swain encourages the Vancouver School Board to install external defibrillators in all schools in the area. Some schools in West Vancouver, Fraser-Cascade, Sunshine Coast and Coquitlam have already installed an AED in their school. Schools within the School Board of Vancouver do not have a defibrillator for public use unless a child with a medical condition and a physician requires the school to install the device.
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