Episode 6: CPR and Defibrillators

Welcome to Episode Six of First Aid Unboxed

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Mark: Hello, and welcome to episode six, would you believe, of First Aid Unboxed with Louise Madeley from Madeley's First Aid Plus. We've already talked about the plumbing, electrics, and mechanics of your body, the circulatory system, bleeds, and what to do. We also had a whole episode on shock, and that was shocking.
Mark: That's the worst joke I've said today. And we had a heart attack and cardiac arrest episode last time. And this time, we're going to be talking about...
Louise: CPR. What does CPR stand for?
Mark: Cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Louise: So we're back to bringing people back to life again, aren't we?
Mark: It's about getting the heart and the lungs resuscitated. In other words, back to life, yeah. And what we're going to cover in this is we're going to cover the... What do you describe as the manual version of this, and then the breath version, and then the mechanical version? Yeah.
Louise: Would we call it that?
Mark: Yeah. So we're going to cover the one...
Louise: You know the one they have on the television where they tell you to stay alive while you're actually doing the heart compressions, I think they call it, isn't it? We're then going to be talking about breaths, and then finally we're going to go through what happens if you need to use a defibrillator. We have one in the studio here with us now, and we're going to go through the whole process.
Mark: We will record what it's saying, and as each bit comes along, Louise will tell you what it means and what you would need to do. So if you are really worried about this, something you really need to listen to is what's going to be happening in the second half of the podcast today. Okay, Louise, let's start.

Understanding CPR: Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation

Louise: CPR, what's the first thing we need to do?
Mark: Okay, so you're going to do CPR, Cardio, Pulmonary, Resuscitation. Cardio is your heart, Pulmonary are your lungs, and resuscitation is trying to get the two working. That's it in a nutshell.
Louise: That's what CPR is doing.
Mark: Okay, there's another version as well, which is hands-only CPR, which we certainly advocate if people aren't happy with doing the breaths, then just stick with the hands-only. But we teach all of it, and then you can choose whether or not you feel comfortable enough to do breaths or not.
Louise: With a First Aider, it's always the same. You have to be willing and able. And if you're not willing, then go for what you are able to do, which would be hands-only as opposed to trying to do breaths if you're not comfortable doing them. Or if you think there may be an infection going on, or another reason why you don't want to do rescue breaths, that is still fine.
Mark: So they don't have to do the mouth-to-mouth as they used to call it?
Louise: Yeah, we teach it. And gold standard, yes, absolutely. If you can and if you're happy to do it and you're confident in what you're doing, then by all means do it. But if you're not, it's okay. That's the important message. It's okay, do hands-only. Something is better than nothing in this situation.
Mark: Absolutely, and with adults, very different to children. When an adult has a cardiac arrest, they still have some oxygen residual in their body. So get straight onto the chest and start doing compressions before you do anything else.
Louise: And will that do the job of the heart, that will get blood continue to pumping around the body? Is that the idea?
Mark: Literally, the pump has stopped or it's ineffective, so it's not pumping around enough for you to be alive. By doing chest compressions, you are actually pushing down onto the heart and making that pump manually with your hands. That's the effect that you're having. So just getting a little bit of oxygen pumped around the body is more important than anything else. You do still have oxygen. With children, you don't.
Louise: A child and a baby will lose oxygen almost immediately. And when you see a child who has stopped breathing, they go blue very, very quickly, as opposed to adults who don't. They do go blue, but just over a longer period because they have that residual, whereas babies and children don't.
Mark: So with babies and children, you go straight for rescue breaths. Really important you do them for them. For adults, less so.
Louise: So if it's hands only that you can do, hands only you do, end of.
Mark: And because of a child's lung capacity, do you have to be very careful about how much breath you put in them?
Louise: Yeah. When I'm doing a course, I always have, I take the lungs out so that people can see just how tiny those lungs are. And it's pretty much, especially for a baby, it's about the equivalent of what's already in your mouth. It's that small amount of air that you're blowing in. But it's nothing to be worried about. If you ever do do rescue breaths on a child, you can feel the resistance. You wouldn't be able to blow lots of air in there. You can see the chest go up, more so than an adult in a way, because babies are perfect and they're elastic. Chest comes up very easily, and you can see what's going on, less so with adults.
Louise: But the important thing with babies is get that breath in more than anything. You're not going to do them any damage to the lungs or anything by blowing air into them.
Mark: So basically, you know, it's the do something, don't do nothing.
Louise: Yes.

When to Start CPR: Recognising the Need

Mark: One of the things I did want to ask you is, at what points do you think you need to start doing this with an adult or anybody? What are the symptoms that you would see and you think, oh, I need to do some CPR here?
Louise: They will drop to the floor. It's as simple as that. They will be out cold, drop straight to the floor, quite often not even clutching the chest or anything. More often than not, there isn't a warning. They will just go into cardiac arrest. It may be that they're having a heart attack and that's led to a cardiac arrest, but all the same, it's literally that they have collapsed on the floor, chest isn't moving.
Louise: So what you would do is your doctor ABC. So we teach danger, response, airway breathing, CPR. So we start with danger. You are the only person that's really important. You are the most important person on this planet. In every sense, you can't look after yourself, you can't look after anybody else. It's that simple. You cannot be the next casualty. So you need to have a look and see if there's anything dangerous around the person.
Mark: How did they end up having a cardiac arrest? Were they electrocuted, for example? You could be the next person.
Louise: So you need to check your surroundings, check the person, make sure you are not at risk at all. Secondly, you need to do response. Now, we use something called AVPU.
Mark: Yeah, my kids love that. It's A-V-P-U. Alert, verbal, unresponsive.
Louise: So all you do is you just put your hands against their shoulders and give them a little nudge. Nobody plays dead, nobody pretends to be dead. When you're out and about, if somebody's collapsed, they're not going to be there for no reason. So just giving them a little bit of a shake on their shoulders is enough. They will respond if they can. So once you've given them a little shake, are they alert, eyes open?
Mark: P is if you have to put your hands on them, and then they respond. V is verbal. So do you need to speak to them in order for them to respond?
Louise: U is unresponsive. So everything that you've done has got no response. So it's classed on A-V-P-U. And when you speak to the paramedics, they'll say, is he alert? And you just do the A-V-P-U. Just say, no, he's P, or no, he's V. Or unresponsive, which in a cardiac arrest, it will be U, unresponsive. That's all they need to hear. So airway breathing circulation comes next.
Mark: Airway, breathing, circulation.
Louise: So airway, put your hand on the forehead, hand on his chin, tilt backwards, open up the jaw and just have a look inside and see if there's anything blocking the airway. That's all you're looking for. By doing that, you're putting them into a neutral position whereby they can breathe. So it'll tell you whether or not you can see anything inside. You don't do finger sweeps, you don't use your hands to pull anything out or anything like that. If it is that they've choked, then you can get them over onto their side and try getting it out, patting them on the back, et cetera. But other than that, put them back onto their back, and then you go to B, which is breathing. So you check the airway, then you check the breathing. All you do is put your face down towards their mouth, and if they're breathing, then you can feel it on the cheek, and you're looking to see if that chest is rising and falling. If you need to move clothes out the way to do it, do it. But just have a look and see if you can see the chest going up and down. If they are, they are breathing. Then you're looking at putting into the recovery position. If they're not breathing, it's CPR. There's only two ways to go now.
Louise: Breathing, not breathing.
Mark: Just very quickly, the recovery position, is that them lying on their side?
Louise: Yeah. The entire point of doing the recovery position is to monitor their airway and to put them in the best, most optimized position to keep their airway open, which quite often can be in the recovery position. But it's not always essential. And just the act of moving somebody can put them at greater risk, depending on what's wrong with them in the first place. But that's somebody who's unresponsive but breathing. CPR is somebody who's unresponsive and not breathing. It's only two avenues you go down. Breathing, not breathing. That's it.
Louise: There isn't any check for circulation, see what colour they are, none of that. Breathing, not breathing.
Mark: And we're going to go down the not breathing path here. So what's our next move then?
Louise: Next move is cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Okay, so heart, lungs resuscitate it. In order to do that, then we're going to talk initially about CPR, so it's not hands only, it's full CPR.

Performing Full CPR: Chest Compressions and Rescue Breaths

Mark: First thing you're going to do is get on that chest. It's essential. If you think 80% of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, as they're known, 80% happen in the home. So it's a much higher chance that it will be somebody that you love, that you're treating, or a very good friend. So statistically, for every minute that you're not on the chest is another 10% chance going to that person. So there's only a 10% chance that you will bring them back anyway.
Louise: And of that 10%, every minute that you're not on the chest is another 10%. So that's 10%, 20%, 30%, very quickly, soon goes down to 0%. So the most important thing you can ever do is get on that chest as quickly as possible and do 30 chest compressions.
Mark: When you're doing a chest compression, you need to, it's very difficult without seeing what I'm doing to get the hands in the right position, but basically one hand on top of the other hand, link your fingers together and pull your wrist backwards. And you're using the palm of your hand. That needs to go mid nipples.
Louise: Okay, so you need to take the clothes off. If you've got a Defib, great, you will find that there's a pair of scissors in there, but anything that you can do to be able to get to that chest, you are going mid nipple. So go for the nipple line right in the centre of the chest, and you are pushing down with your arms straight.
Mark: What I tend to do is go up onto my arms and allow gravity and the weight of my own body to push downwards. So by doing that, you are using your back and your shoulder muscles, not your arm muscles.
Louise: So you have a straight locked arm.
Mark: Absolutely. And you are moving, it's actually your body that you are moving. You are moving your body. It's almost in a rocking position when I am doing it, and I actually cross my feet at the back, and it makes a full rocking motion. And I can do that for a lot longer than if I am just going up and down.
Louise: And you need to go down 5 to 6 centimetres. So that's actually a third of a person's body, basically, if you think of their bones, their rib cage, etc. You're actually going down one third of their body. Same with kids, same with babies. You're going down a third of their body.
Mark: To me, that feels quite an aggressive thing to do, but I assume that's because you've got to make sure that what you're doing gets through to the heart.
Louise: And it is. You know, I can fib and say, no, it's a piece of cake, it's easy. It's not. It's mind-blowingly exhausting to do, especially if you're on your own. And as a community first responder, and having done CPR on people, I've done it on my own without a second person. And it is absolutely mind-blowingly exhausting to do by yourself. And you can't stop. You have to keep going. That's the thing. And actually you feel as though you lose the oxygen in your arms, is what it feels like. Your arms go to jelly, which is why we say willing and able. Somebody might be perfectly willing to carry on with that CPR, but their arms are just gone. And it happens a lot. More often than not, if people are out and about waiting for ambulances to come, it's usually that the responder just cannot physically do the job any more because they are the only person and they're just non stop doing chest compressions. It is exhausting. And when you do it, you can pretty much tell if you're going far enough because the body sort of swings. As you're pushing down on the chest, the abdomen, because of the change in pressure inside, the abdomen will come up and it's almost like a rocking that you see in somebody. If you see that rocking motion of the chest down, stomach up, and vice versa, then you know you've definitely gone down far enough. But at the end of the day, just what you can do is absolutely better than not being able to do anything at all.
Mark: And how long a period do we do this for?
Louise: So you do 30 chest compressions, 100 to 120 beats per minute, which is where the staying in life and Nellie the elephant and things like that come in. I must admit, I don't actually teach it. I don't teach any songs. If you've got a Defib, it's on there anyway. You press a button, a little I button, and it will literally beep for 120 beats. Count it in your head. And the thing is, it's two beats a second. I don't tend to teach the songs because when somebody's doing chest compressions, I'm pretty sure their relatives wouldn't want to know that you're actually singing a song in your head or worse still, singing it out loud. Again, it's about respect and dignity.
Louise: And actually, although it's much harder to maintain dignity, it is still possible. You know, you're cutting off somebody's clothes, opening things up so that you can do the job that you're doing. But if you have bystanders and they're not able to help you and assist and do whatever you need doing, use them as a barrier. I've done that on The Tube before now, where I've just asked people, people do want to help. Even if it's just stand there and protect their dignity, they will be happy to do that because they feel as though they're doing something, even though they're not able to join and help and do active things, passively helping. It stops them from looking on and using phones and all this sort of thing. Just ask them to stand in a row and face outwards so that you are protecting that person's dignity.

Legal Protection and Encouraging Bystander CPR

Mark: The other thing that you've pointed out before on these podcasts and something I think we really need to make sure that people realise is no one has ever been prosecuted for doing this.
Louise: No, absolutely.
Mark: So if you are removing clothes and things like that in order to do this, no one has ever had a situation where they've been prosecuted for this.
Louise: No, the law is very clear, and it's that you are doing something in order for this person to stay alive. And obviously, unless you are doing something specifically inappropriate, shall we say, then absolutely, these days as well, quite often it gets recorded in one way or another. The law is very clear. They are happy for you to do something. And if people are getting into trouble for something that actually they weren't, they were just doing what they needed to do, then that's going to stop people from coming forwards and doing it.
Mark: So once you've done those first initial 30 chest compressions, what's the next move you do then?
Louise: Then you need to take two breaths for them. So exactly the same as if you're checking for the airway. Hand on the forehead, hand on the chin, and lift backwards, open up the jaw, and then you breathe twice into their mouth. Hold their nose, so that the air isn't coming straight out of the nose. So pinch the nose, and breathe straight into their mouth. One big, long breath. Then the second time, so you're doing two rescue breaths, then it's straight back on the chest. You don't leave the chest for more than 10 seconds to do rescue breaths at all.
Mark: OK, and then it's another 30.
Louise: 30, then two, 30, then two, 30, then two.
Mark: OK, and I assume if you're successful, there is a point where the person will start breathing of their own accord.
Louise: Yep. So that's when you stop and then in the recovery position.
Mark: Yeah, we call it ROSC, return of spontaneous circulation. To be fair, it's rare. It doesn't happen very often.
Louise: We get very excited when it does happen. And especially with CFRs, we usually send a message around to say, you'll never guess what, because it is lovely. But to be fair, what tends to happen is you are doing the CPR, and you are doing that until professional help arrives. And then if ROSC circulation returns, it's usually with the paramedics or with the doctors in the recess department. It's very rare that it happens whilst you're doing CPR. It's the other things that are needed, the advanced care.

Using a Defibrillator: Step-by-Step Guide

Mark: So the important thing is early recognition, early intervention, early CPR and Defib. And early advanced care. So you're talking about the paramedics, giving the right medication, doing the follow-up advanced CPR, which again is different. If you're on your own, do you ring 999 first before you do anything?
Louise: I would do chest compressions first. I would do 30 chest compressions and then make the phone call. But literally just 999 onto the speaker and onto the floor.
Mark: So you can keep doing what you're doing and talk to the operator at the same time?
Louise: Yeah. If you can do that, fantastic. If you do need to physically make a call, no, you need to do those 30 chest compressions first and then make the call. If you've got a mobile phone, then great. Just put it onto speaker and put it on the floor and carry on with what you're doing. Either way, no more than a minute before you get on that chest if you can help it.
Mark: Now, you talked about defibrillators, I think most people know them as. Let's have a little talk about that. So what we're going to do here, Louise has brought a defibrillator in for us, and we're going to get her to play the questions or the statements that the defibrillator makes, then she's going to tell you what you need to do and interpret those. It is quite plain and straightforward. It won't need a lot of interpreting. But as we've got Louise here, we're going to get her to explain the process and what you do.
Louise: First of all, many places, these are everywhere now, aren't they? You see them all over the place. Still probably not enough.
Mark: Not enough, but there are plenty of them around now. If you think you need to get that Defib to you so quickly, and if you need to run for a Defib, then generally you're better off not using the Defib because you need it there as quickly as possible. If you're the only person, then you really can't run far enough to get it. That's the problem.
Louise: And they are kept in yellow boxes in public places with a little lightning strike on them, I think.
Mark: Yeah, can be. They can actually be any colour. If you're going to Bridge North, they are red.
Louise: And they could be in phone boxes, they could be on the edge of a business, pretty much anywhere. The thing to do is we've got something called the Circuit, which is a database. If you go onto the Circuit, I think it's circuit.co.uk, something like that. But if you put in the Circuit, it will show you where all the Defibs are everywhere that's registered. And now all ambulance services have the Circuit and can identify whereabouts they are. So as soon as you make the phone call and say, cardiac arrest, he's collapsed, whatever, they'll tell you where your nearest Defib is based on this.
Mark: Right, we're going to turn this one on now and see what it does. So what will people be presented with when they first open the box?
Louise: Firstly, you open it up. The ambulance service will give you a code. So all the community ones have got keypads on them. They'll give you the code. You punch the code in, the door opens, and sitting in front of you, you will have a Defib. So it's generally a square box. It's about 10 inches. It's a square box, and quite often you will have two buttons on it. One is a green button that's just on and off, and the other one is an amber button that's got an electric shock icon on it.
Louise: On the iPads, you've also got one that's got an eye on it, which I'll explain in a minute. And then you've got the pads, which are normally in a silver foil, just to protect them, that's all. With the iPads, which we've got an awful lot around here, which is why I bought the iPad Trainer, it's actually already attached. So the pads are actually physically in the box, and all you'd have to do is pull them out, open it up, and apply the pads. Much better. Take the box out.
Louise: You've also got a starter kit, which you take out, usually in silver foil. All of them are very slightly different, but it's the same concept. Inside that, you should have a razor. So if you've got somebody who is particularly hairy, and you need to place the pads, and there's hair there, you do need to give it a little shave. Purely because there's electricity going through it. Hair is non-conductive of electricity, whereas bone is very conductive, which I'll explain in a sec. So you'll give it a little shave. So you've got a razor there, you've got scissors if you need it, if you need to cut through the bra, for example, or any other clothing, so that you can get full access to the torso, to the upper part of the body. So you've got your scissors, you've got your razor, and you've got the Defib itself. Then you go straight to wherever it needs to be used. Ours is open at the moment, but it actually comes in a little bag. So it's very simple. It's not very heavy at all. Couple of bags of sugar, maybe.
Mark: So then what do we do? Do we switch it on now? What button do we press?
Louise: To know that, you need to understand what a Defib is and why it works. So a Defib, it just means stopping the heart from fibrillating. There are a few different rhythms you just need to know about this one. It's the most common, and it's fibrillation. So what happens when somebody has a heartbeat, it goes from the brain to the top right-hand side of the heart. You get an electrical impulse, and then you get the first contraction. It then goes to the middle of the heart, and you get a second contraction. So it goes diagonally right through the heart. That's the line that the electricity within your body passes through.
Louise: The reason a Defib works, and the reason we put the pads where we do, you put one on the right shoulder and one on the left ribs, just underneath the bust. Reason we're doing that is because you are following that same flow. So the electricity goes from the first pad that you've put on the shoulder, and it will shoot in the right direction through the heart to the second one. And it literally just throws it from one to the other. It just sends the shock straight through. And because you've got fibrillation, which I've mentioned before in another episode, it's when it turns into jelly. So the bottom of the heart is just going like jelly. What you're doing is you are passing the electricity through and stopping that jelly. Then you're rebooting.
Louise: So as soon as you've done that and passed that electricity through, that's when you start doing chest compressions. The minute you switch it on, you just follow every instruction that this box tells you. The other great thing is it's quite loud and the controller who's on the phone, on the speaker phone, on the floor, will hear what's going on as well. So she'll know or he'll know whereabouts you are in the process.
Mark: Okay, so shall we switch it on and see what happens to start with?
Louise: Love to. So two buttons, you've got the green on and off, and you've got the amber shock button. Actually, first of all, I'm going to take the pads out. So the pads on this, it's called an iPad, Intelligent Public Access Defibrillator, is what it stands for. They are situated at the back of it. Now, with the iPads, you get one set of pads. With other ones, like Cardiac Science and a few others, you still get two different pads. You get your adult and your child pads. With the iPad, you don't, and there's a few more coming out now that don't do that. One set of pads, and you change it on the box. So you have adult mode, child mode.
Mark: So on the front of the box, there's literally a big diagram and a little diagram. And you've got a slider, and you either slide it to the child mode or the adult mode.
Louise: Yeah, and it even tells you what ages to use it for. So one to eight and eight over.
Mark: Yeah, under one, you don't use a Defib. One to eight is the child, so you just push it to that. Over eight is the adult, and it's the same with the other types. The only difference is that you would have two different sets of pads. You've got a small set and a large set. It's as simple as that. You just put the right pads on. So if it's one to eight, then you put the small pads on. If it's above eight, then you put the larger pads on. That's the only difference between them. Other than that, all Defibs are exactly the same. They do the same thing.
Louise: So I'm just going to turn it on.
Mark: Call emergency medical services now. Adult mode. Follow the voice prompt calmly.
Louise: You can just turn it to child. I'll do that. Remove all clothing set to paediatric mode. Remove all clothing from chest set to adult mode. Remove all clothing from chest and stomach. Rip clothing if necessary. Take out the pads from the bottom of the device. Tear open the pads packaging. Look closely at the picture on each pad. Peel off the pad labelled one and stick to the bare skin of the patient exactly as shown in the picture. Peel off the pad labelled two and stick to the bare skin of the patient exactly as shown in the picture.
Mark: Important point to make here is when you are putting the pads on, you take hold of the pad and you pull the back off. And then when you put it on, you've got one written on one and two written on the other, okay? And it shows you where to put it. The important thing is that you put it onto bone. So preferably onto the collarbone for the first one. Like I said, it conducts through bone a lot better than it does through fatty tissue. So especially if it's a woman and she's got large breasts, you don't want it on the breast tissue because it just won't get a good enough electrical impulse through. So you're aiming for the bone. And if you need to put it a little higher so it's on the collarbone, that's absolutely fine.
Louise: The second one, number two written on it, it goes at the side of the ribs. And again, if you need to lift somebody's breast up to get underneath and put it onto the ribs, that's fine. That's what you need to do. But make sure that it goes against bone as opposed to onto fatty tissue, which is the same with both men and women. You know, there can be a lot of fatty tissue in that area. Just need to make sure that you're out of the way of it.
Mark: So that first group of instructions, basically switch it on, make sure you've got it in the correct mode, and then where you're going to place the pads, that's the first thing that it tells you.
Louise: Yes.
Mark: And all the defibrillators have these instructions in them?
Louise: Yep, no difference. Absolutely, exactly the same.
Mark: Let's go on to the next section.
Louise: Look closely at the picture on each pad. Peel off the pad labelled one and stick to the bare skin of the patient. Exact, do not touch the patient. Analysing heart rhythm. Shock advised. Stand clear. Press the flashing orange button now. Deliver shock, shock delivered.
Mark: All I've done is press the amber button. So I've just pressed the I button. And that's going at 120 beats a minute. So you literally just do your chest compressions to that noise. So it's going to do it 30 times. Two rescue breaths.
Louise: If you're doing hands only, you just don't do the rescue breaths, you just carry on through it.
Mark: Thanks. At this point, it's going to do it for two minutes, and then it's going to reanalyse.
Louise: OK, so that's one cycle, and it's doing it for two minutes. What it's going to do now is it's going to reanalyse. So it's having a listen, see what the heart's doing. Is it still like jelly? Has it stopped completely? Or is it in a different rhythm? And then it decides, which is exactly what we used to do in A&E, we would sit there and have a look and decide what rhythm it's in, whether or not we need to do another shock or give medication or whatever. This box is just analysing to have a look. It tells you to come away from the patient and stand clear, because if you're next to the patient and if you've got your hands on the patient, there's a risk that it may analyse you as well. So that's the idea of stand clear. It's not delivering a shock, it's just analysing, but it will tell you to stand clear. So it's going to have a listen, decide whether or not it's a shockable rhythm or not. It could be that they've got a ROSC, so spontaneous circulations come back and the heart started beating on its own, fantastic, or it may not. So it's going to say one thing or another, shock or no shock. I'll just start it up again.
Louise: Analysing heart rhythm. No shock advised.
Mark: Okay, so it said no shock, which means it's analysed, decided that whatever rhythm it is in is not something that needs a shock to go through it. Therefore, it's back to chest compressions. So it's not that they've started breathing on their own. It's not the heart started pumping. It's just that it's a rhythm that doesn't need an electric shock to make it better, so to speak. It won't make any difference.
Mark: So it doesn't shock. I mean, these pieces of kit, technically, you could walk around with all day, and nothing will happen to you unless you go into cardiac arrest.
Mark: Is there anything else we need to know?
Louise: Yeah, I mean, the important thing is that you follow whatever it says. So if it says no shock, then it's not going to deliver a shock. Then it'll tell you either back on the chest compressions or not. So it's not going to be the same every time there's a cardiac arrest. It's going to tell you whatever needs to be done. So the important thing is you just follow that voice prompt and continue with whatever it says.
Louise: And again, you will have the controller on your phone as well. The combination of the two, you've got your two best friends there. The most important thing is that you are not afraid to use it. It's a small, inoffensive piece of kit. At the end of the day, it's not going to do any harm by putting it on somebody when it's not required. And control will be on the phone to you as well, talking to you. They are the ones that will say, right, put that Defib on. It's better to have the equipment and not need it than it is to not have the equipment. So run and get that Defib, get it back as quickly as you can.
Mark: If you're on your own, do not go for it. Statistically, going and getting it, it's more likely that you're going to lose that person by going and getting it than if you just do hands-only CPR or normal CPR. So the important thing is you do not have any reason to be afraid of this piece of kit. It can't harm. It will not go off unless somebody is in cardiac arrest, and the rhythm they've got is one that needs to be shocked. It's that simple.
Louise: And as we've said, doing nothing is not an option in this situation, whether it's CPR or whether it's the Defib or obviously both. It's not an option to do nothing, is it?
Mark: Yeah.
Louise: Yeah, if you choose the option, do nothing, then at the end of the day, that person isn't going to live. But there is a possible chance you could save their life if you do do something.
Mark: There's always that chance, yeah.
Louise: Remember, this podcast will be up and about, hopefully forever, and you'll be able to come back and re-listen to it and re-listen to what Louise has been talking about and the whole process of cardiac arrest and how to deal with it. Louise obviously runs her Madeley's First Aid Plus, where she does lots of training for corporate training and training for the general public. You're also a first responder in Much Wenlock in Shropshire, aren't you?
Louise: I am.

How to Contact and Enrol in First Aid Courses

Mark: If you want to know more about what Louise does, what's the best way to get in contact with you?
Louise: You can email me on inquiries@madeleysfirstaidplus.co.uk. You can go on to the website, www.madeleysfirstaidplus.co.uk, and I will get back to you as soon as I can.
Mark: And if people are interested in going on one of your courses, is all the booking details on the website?
Louise: All on the website. You just need to go to courses. It'll show physical first aid, mental health first aid, safeguarding. Just pick the one that you're looking for, and it will take you straight through to the booking page.
Mark: And if you're living in another part of the country, you're not lucky enough to be in Shropshire like we are. If you're listening in another part of the country, is doing a first aid course a good thing to do just regardless?
Louise: Yes, absolutely. Somebody used a phrase on me earlier, actually. The best thing next to creating a life is saving a life. And it's a cliché. It's very cheesy, but actually it's true. Having that skill can make the difference of whether somebody lives or dies. That's the bottom line. It's not one we like to think about, but that is what it is.
Mark: Well, Louise, again, incredibly enlightening. I've never seen one of these machines myself, and it's sitting now right in front of me. Now I wouldn't be afraid to use it, and I wouldn't be afraid to help someone. Whereas before, I wouldn't be too sure what to do. So if you're not sure, have another listen to the episode. It should be able to explain to you what you need to do.
Louise: One other thing as well, if it happens at home, I said before, 80% of cardiac arrests happen in the home. If you are at home and you happen to have an Alexa or any of those smart speakers, they tell you what to do. So if you say, "Alexa, how do I do CPR?" It will teach you how to do CPR. So it'll literally tell you what you need to do.
Mark: Well, that is fantastic to know we've got Alexa in our kitchen, and now I know that. It will certainly help. And I assume it does all the rhythms for you and all that sort of thing.
Louise: So basically what we've heard. 120 beats a minute, it will do that for you. And again, you just follow what she's saying.
Mark: So we'll be back in a couple of weeks' time. And next time, Louise, we're going to be talking about?
Louise: Children. First Aid for Children, basically.
Mark: Yes, the most common things that we see come into A&E related to kids.
Louise: That is fantastic. So we're going to be talking about First Aid for Children, basically, in the next episode, which should be with you in a couple of weeks' time. So if you don't want to miss that, remember, follow, subscribe.
Mark: We'd love it if you would review what we do here and like it because it all helps with people finding out about it as well. Tell friends, colleagues, anyone you know about the First Aid Unboxed podcast. Louise is doing this because she wants to get that message out there as much as possible. It's about raising awareness.
Louise: So thank you for coming in and bringing in your defibrillator and your plastic heart. And we will be back with you in a couple of weeks' time. Thank you very much, Louise.
Louise: My pleasure. Thank you. This is a 1386 Audio Production.

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