Built on a Solid Foundation
- By Jerry Laws
- Jun 06, 2008
No matter whether the AED order is large or
small, companies taking the plunge to deploy
automated external defibrillators at their facilities
are doing their homework, comparing
available models, and making selections based on
performance and reliability. Safety managers who are
overseeing two recent deployments say their companies
adopted AEDs proactively—not because of a fatality in
their ranks—to build on a strong foundation of health
and safety at their facilities.
Dustin Dier,medical services manager for The Shaw
Group Inc., said the company has always had very strong
employee participation in CPR training and first aid,and
now the same is true with AED usage. Shaw (www.shaw
grp.com) has about 27,000 employees who provide engineering,
construction, maintenance, and other services
from its headquarters in Baton Rouge, La., and offices on
five continents.
Dier said Shaw phased in its AEDs starting in August
2007 with 70 defibrillators at about eight corporate facilities
with the largest number of employees. Phase 2, from
September to December 2007, involved 70 additional
AEDs at 45 other corporate locations. The third phase,
which will involve about 80 project sites, will follow after
a committee decides the corporate side’s setup is operating
effectively, he said.
Six months of research preceded Shaw’s deployment,
with vendors brought in individually to make presentations.
While the competing machines were similar, one
manufacturer stood out because of its in-house maintenance
program and some key features of its AED, including
an excellent FDA record and the ability to check
whether the unit’s pads are both in place and working
properly. This winning vendor created a program with
Shaw that checks the machines electronically for readiness;
safety employees at each site also check them visually
on a daily basis, Dier said.
‘We Like to Walk the Talk’
Brampton, Ontario (Canada)-based Brampton Brick
Limited also spent six months on its research and evaluated
12 suppliers’ presentations, said Nick Bartzis, the
company’s health and safety coordinator. This company’s
deployment—seven AEDs to cover around 400 employees
at six facilities in the Toronto, Canada area; Wixom,
Mich.; and Terre Haute, Ind., where Brampton will open
a brick manufacturing facility this fall—represents just a
fraction of the Shaw program, but it was an important
step for the company’s safety effort, Bartzis said.
Bartzis said Brampton’s facilities use lots of automation
and have veteran, dedicated workforces with little
turnover. “ The concern is that we have an aging workforce,”
he said. “ Brampton Brick is committed to the
health and safety of the workers, even their safety at
home.We like to walk the talk.”
Brampton (www.bramptonbrick.com) initially installed
an AED at its corporate headquarters. Management
then asked why there were no AEDs at the rest of
the company’s facilities and soon decided to take the program
companywide, Bartzis said.
Employees at every facility have been trained on first
aid, CPR, and AED use, and they are retrained every 90
days to ensure the material is fresh and retained by the
employees, he said.
A guaranteed four-year battery, superb reliability, and
the self-checks performed by the devices were the top
considerations behind the company’s selection. Ease of
use was important, as well,
“ With the unit, there is a very clear and loud, audible
voice,” Bartzis explained. “It is so easy to understand that
I actually had my six-year-old daughter listen to it, and she
was able to apply the pads and follow the instructions.”
New Recommendation: Hands-Only CPR
The American Heart Association’s Emergency Cardiovascular
Care Committee published a science advisory in
the April issue of Circulation stating that bystanders who
witness an adult’s sudden collapse should notify EMS
and provide high-quality chest compressions, pushing
hard and fast in the center of the chest. The committee
recommends that a bystander not trained in CPR or who
has been trained but is not confident of his or her ability
to provided conventional CPR with rescue breaths
should provide hands-only CPR.
Both the European Resuscitation Council and the
Resuscitation Council (UK) support the advisory because
they, like AHA, want to increase the rate of bystander
CPR after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Listing
several factors in favor of hands-only and against
it, the Resuscitation Council (UK) noted that a controlled,
randomized trial involving 4,400 bystanders
utilizing phone-assisted conventional CPR or compression-
only CPR will begin shortly and “may help to
determine whether compression-only CPR should be
adopted more widely.”
An important point made by the Resuscitation Council (UK) is that benefits of compression-only CPR over conventional CPR usually have been seen only when
EMS response times are shorter than four minutes, but in most areas response times are longer,“and ventilation
[rescue breathing] becomes increasingly important as the
duration of cardiac arrest increases.”
This article originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.