Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House notes:

(1) that October has been designated Shoctober by the Cardiac Arrest Survival Foundation;

(2) that Australian estimates of those dying from sudden cardiac arrest range from 23,000 to 33,000;

(3) that prompt defibrillation increases the probability of survival from cardiac arrest;

(4) that delayed use of defibrillators increases the probability that the victim will die;

(5) that defibrillator deployment guidelines have been developed by the Automated External Defibrillator Deployment Registry after significant consultation;

(6) the commendable staff training and defibrillator placement by Sydney Trains;

(7) that wider availability of defibrillators is desirable; and

(8) that there have been calls that all Commonwealth funded constructions valued over $3 million should have defibrillators and conform to the new Defibrillation Guidelines 1410 (v 1.3).

I want to congratulate Reno Aprile, the director of Cardiac Arrest Survival Foundation; Dr Sue Craig for her articles in the Journal of Health, Safety and Environment; Australian rugby great Nick Farr-Jones; Sydney commentator Alan Jones; and Group Captain Graeme Peel, who has constructed guidelines around this issue. I guess the intervention of Jones and Nick Farr-Jones is to do with the fact that Australian rugby union coach Bob Dwyer is a survivor.

This is of great relevance when it is estimated that 23,000 to 33,000 Australians die each year from cardiac arrest. In toto, that is more than breast cancer, shootings and road crashes. When this organisation tried to put Shoctober on the map, it did so in the context of a very crowded concern with health issues. I know that when I first arrived here in this parliament there were no interest groups to do with any diseases or health problems. Now I think our weeks are crowded, with every second MP having a health group that they are devoted to.

It is important that we try to get this issue on the agenda. It is worth noting that, when defibrillators are utilised quite swiftly, they can have a very large impact. If they are utilised within four minutes, there is a 60 per cent survival rate. However, unfortunately, if it is 10 minutes your chance is about zero. This is of course accompanied by the decline in ambulance response times, which has worsened the problem.

There are, however, some groups that are leading on this front. The Sydney rail network is one of them. Fourteen people have survived because it has acted very strongly for a significant period of time in making sure that defibrillators are provided on many Sydney railway stations and, more particularly, that people are actually trained to utilise them and that they are actually in functioning order. It has been estimated that one-fifth of defibrillators around the place are not in functioning order. This leads to the need for monitoring to make sure that when they are used they are actually in working order.

In the long term, we probably have to look at trying to make defibrillators mandatory in significant government buildings. President Clinton in the United States accomplished that in 2000. One of the long-term aims of the Cardiac Arrest Survival Foundation is that it be mandatory that government building constructions valued at over $3 million have a defibrillator on site. They are campaigning for the aforementioned guidelines to be adhered to in all government buildings and facilities.

The event this year attracted significant numbers of students from St Aloysius College on Sydney Harbour and a significant interest from the Ambulance Service of New South Wales and other emergency services. This indicates that people who are at the forefront of these issues feel that there is some value in raising awareness of them.

It has been estimated that when there is third-party monitoring of AED systems there is a failure rate of virtually zero. Human-monitored systems are frequently poorly maintained, with only half of workplaces monitoring theirs weekly. For a workplace with, say, 50 people the annual cost of an electronically monitored defibrillator is $100 or 27c per person per day. I do not think this is too big an ask of the Australian people and Australian governments, state and federal, to try to minimise deaths in the range of 20,000 to 30,000 per year. It is something we probably never really think about, but that is a huge number. I commend this motion to the House, and I thank the member for Reid for seconding it.

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