As I was talking to one of my friends about medicine and medical schools, he mentioned this site called MedLink. He told me that his brother had told him about this event. Basically, MedLink is a site that supports all of those who wish to study medicine, and hence become a doctor. MedLink hold a few conferences every year at The School of Medicine, University of Nottingham, where they will have presentations, practicals, and many exhibitions/people from all lots of different medical schools who come, set up displays and talk to those who have attended, answering any questions that they might have. So, I decided to have at look at this, and whilst I was browsing the site, I had come across an idea by MedLink, called #HeartSave.
#HeartSave is a campaign created by MedLink which uses Instagram's geo-tagging system to show people where they can find a portable defibrillator, if one is needed urgently. If you find a defibrillator, all you would have to do is take a photo of it, and upload it onto Instagram, with a description like: "#HeartSave This defibrillator was found by AKBIT-HOE at Leeds Train Station Main Entrance". That way, when someone else is in need of a defibrillator, they are able to search #HeartSave and see if there is one close by. The only problem with this is that there are currently only 111 posts on Instagram with the #HeartSave tag, and some of them aren't even to do with defibrillators.
Cardiac arrests and heart attacks are a lot more common than you may think. This could happen to anybody anywhere. Your parents. Your friends. Even yourself. Every year, over 60,000 cardiac arrests/heart attacks happen outside hospital grounds. For those who do not know what cardiac arrest is, it is when your heart will stop beating, and will stop pumping blood around your body. This is very dangerous, and if you ever do witness this, then it is important to call 999 immediately. After that, you should either perform CPR or use a defibrillator on them. The defibrillator is a machine that will send an electric shock to the heart, to try and get it to 'restart'. If someone does go into cardiac arrest, then for every minute that they don't receive CPR or defibrillation, then their chances of surviving will drop by 10%. This is why it is important to gain access to a defibrillator if nobody is able to perform CPR safely.
I am sure that there are more than just 111 defibrillators in the UK, but yet nobody has found and uploaded these onto Instagram yet. So the reason why I'm writing this blog post is to simply raise awareness. Nobody wants to have a cardiac arrest, and nobody really wants to be under the pressure of waiting for an ambulance without being able to do anything else. So, if you ever do come across a public portable defibrillator, then take a moment. If you're with a group of friends, and you see one, then just take a moment. Ignore them if they laugh at you for being 'strage' and take that photo. It doesn't matter if you don't get any likes on your photo. If you post one less selfie, and upload a defibrillator instead, your photo could just be saving someone's life.
Here are some links that you may want to visit:
How To Perform CPR: http://depts.washington.edu/learncpr/quickcpr.html
#HeartSave: http://medlink-uk.net/heartsave/
How #HeartSave Works: http://medlink-uk.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/heartsave-1.pdf
Medlink: http://medlink-uk.net/
British Heart Foundation: http://www.bhf.org.uk/heart-health/conditions/cardiac-arrest.aspx
AKBIT-HOE, 23:55 09/09/2014
