Barry O’Mara and his crew from SPIN have been at it again, making sure that if the residents of Yass need help, they will get it due to the life saving equipment they have supplied over the last few years.
Barry and his team have been hard at it fundraising and Barry just installed another defibrillator device in the district, this time at the Yass Cemetery. The site needed a toilet block and has since been installed.
“Yes, they’ve been pushing for that for years because you can imagine, you get a lot of the elderly up there at the cemetery during funerals and they have got nowhere to go. Michael McManus pushed for that for a long long time when he was on Council and I don’t know how long it took to get it there, but it took a long time. Well, it was in Allan McGrath’s time, so it’s just not maybe two years now. It’s just a single toilet, but it’s been used quite regularly. I noticed a few times I’ve been up there at a few funerals and people do utilise it, so they must of had to hold on for a long time, especially the older ones before it was installed. The toilet roof catches rainwater and uses it for the flushing system.”
“The Lions Club is in the process of looking at putting some additional seating up there as part of one of their projects and a few other things. So while I had an ear from Council to listen, I asked for permission to put that one there for the SPIN Foundation. They said, yeah, go ahead.”
Barry and his SPIN team have the machines all over the district now and he is happy that they have been shown the respect they deserve as life saving devices.
“Hopefully it’s going to be secure. That’s the seventh one now we’ve put in. We’ve put one at the fire shed at Wee Jasper, one out at Barney’s in Bookham, one at the Post Office in Bowning. Just recently put one on the Information Centre here in town. There’s one down at Priceline Pharmacy on the wall outside there, another one over in North Yass at IGA that we didn’t donate originally, but we’ve taken it over and put all new batteries and pads in it and moved it outside. So it’s outside the Centre rather than inside the Centre so the north side people had access to a 24-hour Defib.
SPIN now maintain the machines which require servicing every couple of years to make sure the batteries are charged up and the pads are in good condition.
He said, “Yeah, so all our fundraising that we do, we set so much aside for our patient week to week or month to month expenditures and then we just start grouping a bit together for additional community things like defibrillators. We’re also in the process of talking to Yass Valley Aged Care to get some bed chairs. They’re a chair during the day, but they lay out to a bed if you’ve got people there that are with their loved ones.”
“We donated a couple to Linton or Thomas Eccles as it is now and we gave a bit of a wish list to the Yass Valley Aged Care and they said they could use a couple of them so we are just in the process of getting them to organise them and then we’ll pay for them for them. So we have two av-enues. One is our basically our main goal, when we first set up was just to help individuals, but while we are ever financially viable and going all right, we all always keep putting back in the community.”
Barry explained the history behind Thomas Eccles. He said, “Thomas Eccles was a war veteran and came from around this area here. Old Linton used to be across the road and that was A.B. Triggs, it wasn’t his originally, but he ended up with it. When she passed on she left it to the war veterans to become a house and I think the new one was built in the 1990s.”
“We do it as part of our tour around town. I do a history tour around town, so it was then called Linton. It was old Linton Linton and then it become Thomas Eccles Garden.
At $3000 per unit SPIN has now spent more than $21,000 purchasing the machines and maintenance will continue to cost.
Barry said, “That includes usually the outside box, the defib unit. The ones we donated to the schools, they have two sets of pads, so they were a little bit dearer because they have the earlier model ones, they have a child pad and an adult pad where you just swap the pads out, but all the new units now go on body mass. So if you were to put one on a child, it would read through and it works out how much body mass therefore, how much charge it’s got to give. And if it’s an adult, the same sort of thing, you don’t have to change the pad in these newer ones, it’s the one pad does all, which is a lot better now going forward. You don’t want to have to have someone say, oh, what size pad should I be using, when those few split seconds could mean a difference.”
“We’ve had none of them touched or damaged, luckily, all the ones that we’ve installed so far.”
Barry was happy to receive a letter about 18 months ago, thanking SPIN for having the defibs around the district. “We did have a lovely letter about 18 months ago from a gentleman thanking us for leaving the one down the main street. He rushed down to get it. There was an incident with his neighbour and he flew down and got it but luckily by the time he got back with it, the Ambulance had arrived and they took over. He was probably only a minute away from actually using it. We have to have a list of what the battery dates are. They expire eventually and then the pads need replacing after so many years as well. So we’ll keep maintaining them, any of the ones that we donated.”
“The batteries last about three years. They are pretty maintenance free.”
“We are also in the process of working with Nick Carmody down at Yass printers and on social media, we’re going to put together a list of all the defibrillators in the Yass Valley, Binalong, Bowning, Wee Jasper, Murrumbateman, Sutton, Gundaroo, all the 24 hour ones and then also any businesses that may have one that is accessible, just so people have a list of where they they can find them.
“We are mindful of the fact that not everyone’s on Facebook, especially the elderly, so we will be printing a hard copy, probably a fridge magnet style thing and we will actually list them and then we’re also in the process at the moment of listing them with New South Wales Ambulance Service and the New South Wales government, they have websites where you list them on there as well.”
With SPIN and Barry around, residents can rest assured that there is a great community group looking out for residents. When SPIN does a fundraiser you can safely think that some of that money will go to a defibrillator. It could be to help someone you love, it could help you one day.
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