Raising a family in a rural area comes with a lot of benefits, including a caring community and an often slower pace of life than what the cities offer. There are drawbacks though, and longer — sometimes much longer — emergency response times is one of the major ones.
This drawback is one that Kim Ruether of Project Brock Society was smacked in the face with as she was forced to live through every parent’s worst nightmare.
At Crossroads Crop Conference in Edmonton, Alta., Ruether went on stage to tell her story of having her 16 year old son, Brock, leave for school to attend volleyball practice and not return. Brock collapsed and died of cardiac arrest while in the gym.
During her presentation, Ruether played the 9-1-1 audio recording, in which the dispatcher advises the caller to retrieve the automated external defibrillator (AED) that was available at the gym doors. While the AED was beside Brock, it was never used, Ruether says.
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Ruether founded Project Brock Society to advocate for the training of students, citizens and farmers on how to respond in emergency situations until first responders can arrive on scene, as well as to have AEDs available in every school. Ruether shares that currently the survival rate in scenarios such as Brock’s is 10 per cent or less. However, when bystanders have been trained in CPR and have tools such as AEDs available to them, survival rates could be as high as 50 per cent.
When asked what the response has been to her mission, Ruether responded with, “there’s a real enthusiasm for teachers and students and people are excited about the thought of doing it, but finding the time and the resources is really difficult, so we just need to coordinate everything together and get it happening.”
Find more information on Project Brock and the work that the society is doing on their website.
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