AEDS for Schools

A grass-roots push to put AED - Automated External Defibrillators into every school to revive children who suffer cardiac arrest as well as their teachers, custodians and visiting family members is underway.  Nobody knows today how many people collapse inside schools or at school sporting events from cardiac arrest, but cities and states have begun counting the numbers of lives saved by defibrillators in schools. 

Schools are a logical place to put AED defibrillators, doctors say, because on any given day as much as 20% of a community's population passes through its schools. Though many of the people saved by the defibrillators have been adults, the preventable deaths of children have fueled the grass-roots efforts. Boston — which has one of the best track records of saving victims of cardiac arrest — has had automated external defibrillators in all of its public high schools and some of its elementary schools. Across Tennessee, there have been 22 cardiac arrests at schools over the past five years, says Mark Meredith, medical director for Nashville's Public Access Defibrillation program. An AED was used to revive six of those people at the school. Getting a shock from a defibrillator within just a few minutes of cardiac arrest is key to saving these people. The odds of survival decrease 10% for every minute that a victim goes without such a shock, meaning that waiting for the typical EMS response to a 911 call is most often fatal.
                                                     AEDs for Schools▼