St John WA and Bunbury Farmers’ Market celebrate big milestone with 10,000th Automated External Defibrillator (AED)

St John WA has surpassed a major milestone for the State Defibrillator Network and is rapidly careering towards another two.

This week, St John WA registered its 10,000th Automated External Defibrillator (AED) on the network at Bunbury Farmers’ Market.

Donated by Woodstock West Retirement Village, the AED is now registered to the network, which will allow the State Operations Centre to deploy help in the critical first few minutes following a cardiac arrest.

Facilitated by the St John WA Community First Responder (CFR) team, AED registration has grown quickly over the past year.

The team is headed towards two other important milestones:

• 8000 AED locations – this is when an individual has registered more than one AED in a single location, for example a workplace might have multiple devices.
• 3000 24/7 publicly available AEDs, where the device is stored in an external lock-box which is accessible to the public and can be deployed at any time. 

A range of programs are under way to expand the network and make AEDs as common in buildings as fire extinguishers.

St John WA Group CEO Kevin Brown has met with a range of local Members of Parliament to explain the importance of community AEDs, which has resulted in an increase in devices located in the South Perth electorate.

The Social Sustainability team is working with partners keen to donate community AEDs.

More information about the CFR network can be found HERE.