In the October/November issue of NewsFour we wrote about the Public Health (Availability of Defibrillators) Bill 2013 which deals directly with the installation of defibrillator machines.
On the 11th December 2013, the first local public access defibrillator (AED) was installed in Eurospar on Bath Avenue.
NewsFour spoke to Brian Downes the director at Pulse Medical and Emmet Switzer founder of the InterSevens soccer club to find out more about how this came about.
The AED is a unit that increases the chance of survival of someone who is in cardiac arrest. According to Brian, you can’t shock somebody by mistake so the beauty about this device is that even if you haven’t been trained to use this, it has very simple instructions. Therefore anyone can figure it out, and potentially save someone’s life.
Emmet tells NewsFour, “When you learn about how many people die unnecessarily every day in Ireland of cardiac arrest, it’s needless to say there should be one of these units on every street corner in Ireland.”
The InterSevens are a charity soccer league in Ringsend with over 700 members. The relationship with Pulse Medical originally started when the InterSevens won a training course for eight at an event in the Aviva Stadium. After this event, Emmet sought to raise money so that a local public access defibrillator could be installed. Alex Cordero, manager of Slatterys and the Slatterys soccer team joined forces with Emmet to raise this money. They raised just under €3,500 to install the defibrillator on Bath Avenue.
Pictured: Emmet Switzer presents Racquel Kirwan with the AED at Eurospar Bath Avenue.
By Donna Dunne
