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Pulse Point app could save lives

  • Scott LaMar


 

Picture you’re on a street, in a store shopping or attending a sporting event and someone nearby collapses—suffering what could be a life threatening medical emergency – say cardiac arrest. The time it takes to get that person to the hospital and treatment could make all the difference in his or her survival.

Now, imagine someone is quickly on the scene to provide CPR or use an AED.

There’s an app for that. Pulse Point can notify those nearby who are certified in CPR.

Darrell Fisher is the EMS Council President and EMS Chief of the New Holland Ambulance Association, and was with us on The Spark Thursday, who explained how Pulse Point works,”It sends a signal out on the app if you’re within a half a mile of someone that needs CPR and they’re in a public location, your phone will be alerted and if you’re able to help them out. So in the building that we’re sitting here, if someone would go in cardiac arrest, my phone would alert because I have the app, downloaded. I’m a trained professional and I could hopefully find that individual and start care now.”

Fisher said time is most important when someone has suffered cardiac arrest,”We know is 70% of these cardiac arrests happen at home. So this is around your loved ones. So if you don’t know CPR, go find out. Go find out how to do compressions if not for the public, for your loved ones. But when your heart is not beating properly, your brain cells are not being oxygenated. The blood’s not getting in your brain. Brain cells are dying. Those don’t regrow. Those don’t, you know, grow back. It is so important when that heart’s not beating properly, something is being done to oxygenate that brain. CPR is like artificially pumping blood to your brain to keep those cells alive until hopefully we can restore the blood pressure from your heartbeat if the problem originally can be fixed. So CPR saves lives, saves brain cells, and each year we have these folks that walk out of the hospital, no deficits because somebody was trained, someone who was in the area to start compressions prior to the mass arrival.”

Fisher added that Pulse Point was used about a hundred times in Lancaster County during the month of May.

 

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