The life-saving power of defibrillators taken to heart at Bembridge RNLI

The incident came at the same time as the crew at Bembridge are raising funds to get a defibrillator fitted to the outside of the lifeboat station.

Guy Willing, who only became coxswain at Bembridge two months ago, was about to enjoy a rare afternoon off when he became stuck in traffic on Foreland Road, Bembridge.

On realising the hold-up was because someone had collapsed on the pavement, he left his vehicle and found a group of people carrying out CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) and using a defibrillator to try and get the man’s heart started.

‘You can’t walk away from that,’ explained Guy, ‘I said would you like me to have a go and I carried on with the compressions while another person at the scene did the air. I just did what I was trained to do.’

Guy and the other members of the public at the scene used the defibrillator to shock the man four times before the paramedics arrived on the scene and he was taken to hospital.

‘I wasn’t saving lives at sea, but was an extremely small cog in a group of about four or five people, I gave a bit of assistance in a small way’, said Guy who moved to the island in 1974 when his father, who was in the Navy, was posted to Portsmouth.

The demonstration of the effectiveness of defibrillators in saving lives came at a pertinent time for Bembridge Lifeboat Station. The crew are currently raising funds to buy a defibrillator machine which will be placed on the outside of the lifeboat station and available for use to the general public.

‘It just goes to show how important defibrillators are – and shows why the crew are carrying out their own fund-raising to get a machine on the outside of the station,’ said John Keyworth, Lifeboat Operations Manager at Bembridge.

‘We need to raise £1750 and we are nearly there. Using defibrillators, which give a high energy electric shock to the heart, have been shown to be very effective when treating people who have gone into cardiac arrest,’ he added.

Ends

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