Lifesavers: Bishop's Stortford wealth and law firms show they're all heart

Three new defibrillators are about to be installed in Bishop's Stortford town centre.

One will be set up in the Jackson Square shopping centre, one at the Tourist Information Centre in Market Square and one in the phone box in Potter Street at the top of the steps to Devoils Lane.

People who live, work and shop in the town centre can learn how to operate the life-saving pieces of equipment and perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) during two free training sessions delivered by health and safety expert Brian Goodwin, today (Aug 2) and Tuesday, August 28.

Brian launched his ‘Save a Life’ campaign last November. Over the past nine months, the former Army medic has been finding out where all the town centre defibrillators are located.

“I started the Save a Life campaign after I heard a man died in the car park near Waitrose,” Brian said. “I asked myself ‘Why didn’t someone grab the nearest defibrillator, which was only a couple of hundred metres away in the dentist surgery?’”

After the man’s death in August last year, Brian decided that something needed to be done. He approached the Independent for help to publicise his campaign, and the series of articles was picked up by financial advisers Hanbury Wealth, which offered to buy a defibrillator to be installed in Jackson Square.

From their lead, the Nockolds law team followed suit and bought a defibrillator for the Tourist Information Centre.

Julie North, Hanbury Wealth’s business development and marketing manager, explained: “When Brian gave a demonstration to the Hanbury Wealth team, he mentioned the lack of defibs in our actual shopping centre, which led Julia [Nicholas], the finance and facilities manager, to want to change this.

“Julia then spoke to Nockolds, with whom they have a close working relationship, and they also wanted to support this project.”

The phone box defibrillator is being brought to fruition by Bishop’s Stortford Town Council. It adopted the phone box from BT and the Herts and Essex Community Charity has provided the defibrillator.

The defib is ready to be installed, but the kiosk has been vandalised, and repair works, estimated to cost around £1,000, will need to be carried out first.

“I’m dismayed at the state it’s now in,” said Cllr Colin Woodward. “But I can point out that it’s under a CCTV camera so we’ll be doing an investigation.”

A defibrillator gives a high-energy electric shock to the heart through the chest wall to someone who is in cardiac arrest – a condition that strikes around 140,000 times a year in the UK.

When a person suffers cardiac arrest, every minute that they do not receive CPR and defibrillation reduces their survival rate by up to 10%. Without any immediate treatment, 90-95% of cardiac arrests are fatal. However, if a defibrillator is used within three to five minutes of arrest, survival rates rise to 74% on average.

Brian’s CPR and defib training session today will take place at Bishop’s Stortford Methodist Church between 9am and 5pm. The session on Tuesday, August 28 will take place at Jackson Square in the morning and the Tourist Information Centre in the afternoon.