Thanks to a grant from the Lottery Fund, the Council has obtained a cPAD (Community Portable Access Defibrillator) which has been installed in the Telephone Kiosk in Mere Road. This has now been fully commissioned and is ready for use.

However, for safety reasons it is kept in a locked cabinet, and not freely available.

In the unfortunate event of an emergency you should do exactly the same things you normally would, i.e. dial 999 and ask for "Ambulance". They will carry out an assessment, and if they think it worthwhile (considering where the patient is, and how long it will take before the ambulance arrives) decide whether to ask somebody to fetch the defibrillator. If so, they will issue a code to provide access to the cabinet.

Obviously, the best outcome will be if nobody is ever called upon to fetch the device, but if it is necessary, it is obviously better if more people know what is involved. The Community Heartbeat Trust, who provided and installed the device, would normally offer a training session open to all, but in the time of Covid that is not possible. Click here to see a very good video about what to do.

The defibrillator we have is the ZOLL AED 3, which is always the last (fourth) device demonstrated in the video.

Apparently, if you suffer from a cardiac arrest outside a hospital setting in this country your chances of survival are only 7%, which sounds appalling. This is because so few people know what to do or how to administrate CPR. We now have a tool in the parish which can help to improve this figure - it just needs people to watch a short video and learn how to use it.