Wow! Nothing more - just WOW!

Half a million??? No. Half a million dollars' obligatory expense billed to everybody in TV?? No.

$50 to $100 per year per household, voluntarily, in a neighborhood unit per year? YES!!!

All of which is why organizing a sustainable budget, getting training, gathering voluntary funding, and being pro-active neighbor-to-neighbor, at the grassroots level is always better than waiting for some elected officials or a developer to do it for us.

It is our choice. It's nobody else's business except our neighborhood unit.

That's why this is a great country, and an American hometown that looks out for each other!

Saving one life.....priceless!

And saving one life could substantially lower a hospital bill that might otherwise be well north of $500k.

Hospital bill will be about the same if aed was used or not..not going to skip medical treatment just because an aed was used once you get to ED and then cardiac ICU...of course if end results are cardiac death there will be minimal hospital bills.

Not necessarily true. If they save heart muscle it decreases the potential

Potential for open heart surgery...which is extremely expensive.

Open hearts have changed over the last 20 years. If you have blockage an aed is not going to change that, just get you a jump start. No more standing in the same spot for a 10 hour surgery. Bypass and valves can be done less invasive unless the back of the heart comes into play. it's only a few hours, or less. Been doing hearts since 1975. Great changes are still coming.

That's good news. Thanks.

Is that $275 per household? If so, that's lot. We have one and Steve had an additional one at his office. I think they were under $1500 each and they are good ones. Our neighbors have our garage code key in case it's ever needed.

Okay just a thought as I've been reading this thread. My questions are :
is the AED being kept in the garage for easy access.
Where are the pads being kept with the AED or does each individual on the program pads at their own home.
I'm grateful that people take the time to practice runs.
My thought is and hope that the person involved called 911 first.
Then activate The AED team.
My concern is that an AED kept in a hot garage during the summer may or may not function as quickly as it should.
The pads also may become non-sticky or gooey and may not adhere to the person.
My third concern is are the AEDs being checked on a weekly basis to ensure they are working correctly.
One may find by the time the AED team is activated gets the AED goes to the home and starts to assess the person I am in hopes that the fire department will be there just as quickly. If not the AED team will be able to respond and help the party.

I have had the experience of doing CPR in a driveway in the villages. I hit my OnStar button when I got out of the car spoke quickly and thoroughly to the respondent on OnStar. In less then 2 minutes according to on star (I might add in a new village with only 3houses occupied ) I had help from the fire department. At the end of my compression round they took over

Did it make me feel good for what I did yes and another way sad that sometimes no matter how hard you try you cannot change the outcome of someone's life

We have 5 distributed throughout our neighborhood. They are located outside on posts with lock boxes. Responders have keys to the locks. Our initial payment was $150, with an estimate of another $30 every 3-5 years for battery replacement. The decision to do this was made with the input of our entire neighborhood. The Public Safety department recommended locations for the units and provided instruction to volunteer responders.

By the way, I'm not sure there would be a way to eliminate those who don't pay (to be differentiated from those who don't want treatment) because the decision to send responders is made by 911.

In our neighborhood, the AEDs are in a weatherproof enclosure mounted on the side of two homes and all responders have a key. We have not had any problems with pads deteriorating and the pads are inside the AED case itself.

Our training emphasizes calling 911 before starting CPR. Our system is set up so that a call to 911 from our neighborhood automatically triggers phone, cell phone, and text message to our responders so that our people are on the scene with our AEDs within a short time. In our test runs, we were at the patient several minutes before the paramedics with both AEDs and doing CPR.

Our AEDs are monitored regularly.

An email to The Villages Public Safety Department, asking for statistics on the neighborhood program, resulted in this response. ( I think it is impressive that when one of the Departments within the VCCD is asked a question, a quick response is received)
______________________________________________

Currently we have over 140 AED neighborhood programs covering approximately 12,500 homes with 380 AEDs. In the 6 years of the neighborhood program, we have only had 18 call-outs, where a 911 caller reported a cardiac arrest in an AED neighborhood. we’ve had six cardiac arrest SAVES. That doesn’t sound like much (33.3%), but of the 18 call-outs, there were only 8 viable patients. In other words, there were ten patients who were not able to be saved under any circumstance. (Example: One caller reported “Send help. I think my grandfather has died.” Well, grandpa had been dead for several hours as evidenced by rigor mortis , etc. We’ve had other patients who were in similar states, even though responders were called out). But of the 8 viable patients we’ve had 6 saves for a save-rate of 75%. I think that’s pretty impressive!

You also need to look at the AED program in the Recreation Centers and softball fields. Over the years, we have had no fewer than ten saves at the rec centers, softball diamonds, and sports pools. This is attributed to early initiation of CPR and use of the AEDs. So, does The Villages AED program work? Absolutely!


Gail

Capt. Gail J. Lazenby, M.S., EMT-P

EMS Training and Quality Assurance Officer

The Villages Public Safety Department

Excellent, Bogie.:eclipsee_gold_cup:

Is there a program in Pinellas?

We are part timers right now and won't be full timers until September 2015 but if I can contribute to my neighborhood program I want to do so, but need to know how.

Give him a call.
Capt. Gail J. Lazenby, M.S., EMT-P

EMS Training and Quality Assurance Officer

The Villages Public Safety Department

3035 Morse Boulevard

The Villages, FL 32163

Office: 352-205-8280 ~ Fax: 352-205-8290

Gail.Lazenby@districtgov.org

Ummmm. Gail is a guy. He recently retired (despite the wishes of many to keep this much beloved man at Public Safety). Shortly before he retired, he was assisting at Mass when a member of the congregation had a heart attack. Gail used the AED he had purchased for his church to save the person's life.

He's now busy ministering to the spiritual needs of Villagers instead of their physical ones.

Find out from your neighbors if a neighborhood AED program has been started. If not, you'd need a person (preferably a nurse, dr., or paramedic/EMT) to organize and meet to get neighbors involved; make contact with fire dept. about training, dispatch procedures, etc.; get neighbors trained; make a sustainable budget and develop ways of funding it thru homeowner donations, fundraiser events, raffles, or a combination of those; develop a schedule of who's on call in the neighborhood during what months, in light of snowbirds gone for summer etc.

It can be done. All neighborhoods here have people with lots of experience managing a business, volunteer corps, etc. TV is actually a goldmine of people with managerial experience and ambition to help others.

Our neighborhood was introduced to the program by a couple in the neighborhood, a former nurse and a former cop. They contacted Gail Lazenby and he set up how many our neighborhood would need and the locations. A voluntary contribution was set up in our neighborhood with people contributing what they thought the program was worth and kept collecting until they could afford to put the program in effect. Most people contributed $50-100. Of course this depends on how many units are in your neighborhood and how your village decides to have their socials, website or whatever means you have of keeping in contact with your whole village, part of village, certain streets etc. We are in Pennecamp but Pennecamp is broken up into at least 4 separate sections. Our section includes villas and homes and we have a social and website by which we keep in touch with what is going on in our neighborhood. It consists of 6 streets and we have 3 AED's and over 30 responders. We have had test runs and beat the fire dept each time.