West Huntspill Parish Council has recently received a grant for a public defibrillator from the British Heart Foundation – and training on how to use it has been carried out this week for local people.
The new defibrillator is to be installed outside the Crossways Inn in the village very shortly.
“As part of the grant funding West Huntspill held a CPR and defibrillator training event on Saturday (April 14th) at the Balliol Hall,” said Alex Harris, Clerk to the Parish Council.
“We trained 10 members of the village in life-saving skills and this will be the first session of many to raise awareness of importance of CPR.”
When someone suffers a cardiac arrest, their heart stops pumping blood around their body and they will die within minutes without treatment.
For every minute without defibrillation, a person’s chance of survival decreases by around 10 percent.
However, a bystander giving immediate CPR and defibrillation can double a person’s chances of survival in some cases.
In 2016, a £1 million partnership with the Department of Health was announced by the British Heart Foundation to make public access defibrillators and CPR training more widely available in communities across England. This has helped to fund over 14,000 life saving defibrillators in towns, cities and villages across the UK – more details are available here.
