New defibrillator at County Durham homeless hub
Cornerstone is working with Missed A Beat and the town council
A County Durham homeless hub say they've installed a new defibrillator at its building as the nearest ones didn't work when a young person had a cardiac arrest.
The incident happened in January during SWEP, one of the coldest and busiest times for Cornerstone in Bishop Auckland.
They've been working with the town council and Missed A Beat, a defibrillator charity based in Newton Aycliffe.
Nicky Morson from Cornerstone said: "Obviously we're massively trained for any first aid, but we very, very quickly realised that the closest defib to our area was a drive away, which was very, very scary. It was that far away that the ambulance arrived before our team member got back with the defib. It ended up being fine, you know, the individual was okay, but it massively highlighted a massive issue which we never even thought of.
"Me and Bob, we do daily walks of the town centre and we know it really well and we do see defibs everywhere. So I couldn't understand why we couldn't just connect to the closest one, which was, you know, literally other side of the precinct. There are so many defibs which are being installed, but they're just not ready to be used, which is absolutely madness."
Mark Preston, founder of Missed A Beat, said: "The defibs that are closest to here, I've investigated, I've looked at them, the cabinets are physically there, the defibrillators are physically inside. I have concerns straight away when I see a defibrillator cabinet that doesn't have a postcode or anything that identify the location of it. Obviously they should be all linked to the National Circuit.
"We did a live check from the hub here. Three of the 24-hour community defibrillators that are in within this location, which were a lot closer, were unavailable. And that's down to poor maintenance.
"When you're walking past these defibrillators, you automatically think that 'oh, if anything happens here, we're OK.' But unfortunately, that's not the truth because there's so many out there that aren't looked after. The average in the country is 10% of the defibrillators that are out there. So if there's 100,000, 10,000 of them aren't available, which is really concerning.
"This brand new, state-of-the-art bus station here should have one. It hasn't got one, unfortunately, but just literally metres away from it, there are devices, but they're not accessible because the one that I've investigated in, the defib that's inside it, has got pads that are over a year over date, which is absolutely ridiculous."