SPIN Foundation committee members Donna Luff and Yvonne O’Mara along with Yass Tourist Information Centre Member Ann Farmer with the latest 24 hour accessible defibrillator which was donated by the Foundation and Installed by the Council maintenance team earlier in November.
Located on the outside wall facing towards Coronation Park, additional signage (pictured) will be added to all the defibrillators within the Shire soon.
Yass SPIN Foundation have been scattering these life-saving items across the Shire, hoping to get as many places covered as possible to save lives in the Shire.
Barry O’Mara, President of the SPIN Foundation, said they have been doing this for a while now.
“We have put one in at Bowning, one at Bookham and one at Wee Jasper. This is the third one around Yass now. The 24 hour accessible defibrillators are very important to the community. Hopefully, they will never get used, but we know there’s a chance that they will and the fact that they are at places like Woolies means that people can know where they are,” he said.
“We are in the process of getting some bigger signage put on them so they stand out a little bit more, plus putting a list together of registered ones, not only the ones we put in but where all the defibrillators are located in businesses around town that we will then distribute through the newspaper and social media so that people know where they can access one if they need it.
“There’s no doubt they are life saving. We have had one taken from Priceline to be used, but by the time they went and grabbed it and got back the Ambulance had arrived at the same time so they didn’t have to use it themselves, but were aware that it was there.”
If the Ambulance was held up or a bit further away, it would have been used.
“We got a nice letter from a gentleman saying that he had gone and grabbed it and planned to use it, but didn’t have to at the time.
“The SPIN Foundation has also put them into the schools in the Shire that didn’t have them in place already. They are a life saving piece of equipment and there’s no doubt that they have proved that. The indication of that is now all the RFS vehicles carry them and they are becoming more and more popular.
“It wasn’t something that was on our radar originally when we started the foundation up, it was more aimed at helping out individuals with their costs in regards to their medical conditions, but then as we became more financial and we had seen the bigger need that we started doing the defibrillators and then putting the emergency equipment into the hospital and the aged care facilities.
“The vein finder that we put into the hospital makes the nurse’s job so much easier to find veins when they are working on patients.”
The SPIN Foundation have taken it upon themselves to maintain the defibrillators and go and check on them periodically and they replace the pads in them as they have a used by date.
“As they come out of date we have a list of those dates that we will then go and purchase new pads to swap them over.
“There’s certainly a lot of pride in driving around and seeing them dotted around the shire, places like Bookham that are on the busy Hume Highway that someone might need them and drive in and be able to access one straight away. Wee Jasper is such a remote area that if someone had an incident there they would be dead before an Ambulance even got there. To have one there and available to them in those remote areas is very pleasing.
“We do have another one ready to donate and we are just trying to work out the best place to put it here in town. It’s been suggested that we may put one up at the cemetery for people that are attending funerals as apparently there has been a number of incidents up there in the last six
months where people have had a turn.
“The only thing that concerns us a little bit is how remote it is and whether people would try and damage it or steal it. The ones around the town are in clear view and you would think most people would do the right thing by them.
“It takes the one wrong person to do something to them. They are worth $2500 and it’s not just something that we can find the money for straight away. We work hard for it and allocate so much towards it out of our yearly finances for that sort of stuff.
“But it’s a risk we are willing to take because if it saves one life out of the ten or so that we have donated now, we have done our job.”
-Jack Murray