Hi, do I require a salutation? If you are reading this Blog, please consider yourself a part of the Valley family.  Welcome 🙂

My name is Rick and I am the Customer Experience Director at Valley First Aid, ‘Your Safety Authority’.

I went and watched a Zoll AED Plus demonstration being held by a ‘competitor’ the other night and I was flabbergasted by what I witnessed, hence, the birth of this week’s blog post.

The unnamed training provider, told the small crowd that the AED was a great insurance policy to the benefit of people who were suffering from a heart attack, WRONG!

I am going to post here weekly and offer you advice, industry contacts, training savings and some education.  Today is, education.

Too often, people use the two medical conditions, heart attack and cardiac arrest interchangeably, but they are not the same. A heart attack is when blood flow to the heart is blocked, a “circulation” problem and sudden cardiac arrest is when the heart malfunctions and suddenly stops beating unexpectedly, an “electrical” problem.

AED’s  (Automated External Defibrillator) deal with the ‘electrical problem’.  It’s a medical device that can deliver a potentially life saving shock, to a patient who’s heart is in a shockable and often chaotic rhythm.  Most commonly, the heart is in either ventricular fibrillation or ventricular tachycardia and are usually life-threatening arrhythmias, that can be corrected if an AED is put into use within the first few minutes of onset to sudden cardiac arrest (SCA).

The Zoll AED Plus is a great defibrillator due to its ease of use (metronome, audio and visual prompts), low cost of ownership and their one piece, patented D-pad system, that measures the depth, rate and quality of chest compressions.  Ineffective chest compressions are one of the reasons for the low patient success rate from CPR alone.  The unnamed training provider told the small crowd that chest compressions should be 1 1/2 – 2 inches deep on the adult (not since 2010, yikes)  The current protocols are firm in stating that chest compressions in an adult are 2 inches deep and at a rate of at least 100 compressions per minute.

If you would like to know more about the Zoll AED or good quality CPR, call me, enrol in one of our CPR classes or check out this link with 2010 CPR guidelines – http://www.heart.org/idc/groups/heart-public/@wcm/@ecc/documents/downloadable/ucm_317350.pdf