Jacquie Corkery
PSC Parent Council
We have all seen these heartbreaking headlines:
A ball strikes a 14-year-old baseball player in the chest, sending his heart into a deadly irregular rhythm. Although he received CPR and the hospital is less than a mile away it takes 12 minutes of the boy to receive defibrillation. He dies . . .
After being cleared by a basic physical, a young teacher suffers a sudden cardiac arrest while running a basketball practice. A defibrillator arrives too late to save her. An autopsy discovers an undiagnosed heart condition . . .
These stories could have had a different ending had there been an AED onsite and easily accessible.
Each year more than 45,000 Canadians suffer from sudden cardiac arrest. Research shows that early defibrillation is a vital step in survival. Although statistics on how often an AED is used in a public setting is not easily accessible due to lack of reported incidents we do know that use of an AED within the first three minutes of an arrest can increase an individual’s chance of survival by up to 75 per cent.
Thanks to the Chick for Charity and your generosity . . . we are proud to say that we will be able to install automatic defibrillators at five of the local Wolf Creek Public Schools (WCPS).
Further to this we will be able to fund training of CRP and AED use to approximately 50 individuals.