News: Socially Responsible Guildford Cathedral installs a State of the Art DOC Defibrillator

Guildford Cathedral, which welcomes over 150,000 people a year to its services, concerts and other events, has joined the mission to deploy life-saving defibrillators in public places throughout the UK. On Thursday of this week, the Dean inaugurated the revolutionary DOC system defibrillator, the world’s first automated, fully connected defibrillator. It can be operated by anyone and automatically summons the emergency services.

The Very Revd Victor Stock, Rob Williams from BST and Penny Peters, one of the Cathedral's first aiders

Over 124,000 people in the UK suffer a heart attack every year, but only 5% of those who experience one outside a hospital survive, unless they get adequate medical assistance very quickly. In the USA the survival rate is 40%, due to the large number of defibrillators available in public places. A defibrillator is a life-saving machine which can give the heart an electric shock in some cases of cardiac arrest. Research shows that applying a controlled shock within five minutes of collapse provides the best possible chances of survival.

The defibrillator is supplied, fitted and maintained by Butler Safe Technologies and is their state of the art DOC system. The Red Cross are providing training for the Cathedral’s team of first aiders. However, any person, medically-trained or not, can use automated external defibrillators.

The main benefits of this revolutionary new DOC system are:

• The moment the defibrillator unit is removed from its case a GPRS signal is sent directly to Mondial Assistance. A coordinator at Mondial immediately makes contact with the person holding the unit through the two way speaker system (the unit acts as a hands-free mobile telephone). They establish that it is an emergency situation (rather than the unit being moved in error) and send the GPS coordinates to the emergency services letting them know that it is a cardiac arrest. This saves valuable time.
• The Mondial Assistance operator continues to talk to the person who is operating the unit and guides them through the process
• As soon as the defibrillator is correctly attached to the patient, a full ECG (electrocardiogram) is automatically carried out. This determines whether that person is suffering an arrest. This takes away any need for judgement by the user. The ECG reading determines the power of the shock required and gives instructions to the user to stand back from the patient before shocking.  It then talks them through the CPR procedure and even provides an audio metronome rhythm for the heart massage rate.
• BST monitor the unit remotely 24 hours a day to ensure that it is fully charged and in working order.

Click here (PDF) to download full details.

Further information: Penny Peters 01483 547868 penny@guildford-cathedral.org

Added Friday 8th June 2012