Public Access Defibrillators Can Only Save Lives If People Can Find Them
Jennifer Yuan won a prize for locating 400 of the heart devices tucked away in Philadelphia buildings.
A huge part of what we do here at The Mikey Network is placing defibrillators, MIKEYs, in public places. Experts say that in general, odds of survival are reduced by 10% for every minute a person is collapsed from a sudden cardiac arrest without cardiopulmonary resuscitation or defibrillation. So it is not only important to place as many MIKEYs as we can, it is also important to let people know they are there.
We do this onsite, by including signage as well as custom cabinets for our MIKEY AEDs. We do it online with a map of our MIKEY locations.
More needs to be done to identify the location of ALL public defibrillators. Today, the Wall Street Journal published an article about an initiative in Philadelphia, PA that used crowd sourcing to identify the locations of the publicly placed AEDs throughout Philadelphia.
It’s a really smart initiative so we wanted to share this article with TEAM Mikey. Please click the link below to read it.
photo credit: Charles Fox, The Wall Street Journal
