Our new AED trainer unit
Training defibs – (re)familiarise yourself with an AED
Defibrillators in schools, offices and local communities are a great idea, vital even. However, do you have enough people trained on using them? Perhaps some volunteers have moved house, left the company or are no longer available.
We strongly recommend training and regular retraining on the defibs you have spent so much time and money putting in place to help save someone’s life. For most people, using a defibrillator for the first time is a daunting prospect. With that in mind, we have recently added a simple and cheap trainer defib to our range. It can help volunteers become accustomed to an AED and effectively train them on how to use a clinical AED in an emergency (Automatic External Defibrillator).
We are by no means suggesting this replaces accredited training when you first receive a defib and need to understand how to use it, but refresher training is vital and branded training units can cost over £400, so this is a simple, cost effective alternative.
How life-like is the training unit?
The point of the training unit is to familiarise volunteers with what would happen in a real life emergency. The training defibs are small, portable, and have an LED display, much like most real defibs, and verbal instructions on using the defib, so they are a perfect tool to make people feel more confident in a real like situation.
The training defib we stock has a voice prompt with 16 languages to choose from – so if you are in an environment where the most common language used is not English, this can still be used to train your volunteers. The training unit has voice prompts, and the LED display indicates a two-minute CPR pause time between shocks (this is when you should be performing CPR following the shock).
This compact unit can simulate electrode pads – so can tell people where to put the pads or if the pads are not positioned right on the person in cardiac arrest. It also comes with a connector and trainer defib pads.
Steps to using the training defib pads
- The user turns on the unit without the electrode pads being connected
- The user then attaches the pads to the chest of the manikin.
- Once the pads are attached, the user then plugs in the pad connector so the unit will talk through the procedure.
This sequence is not technically how live AED’s work but the trainer can talk through the differences with your volunteers. The training unit gives a good idea of the basic principles of how to use a defib in a emergency situation.
Who can train my volunteers?
One of our trusted partners, AED Donate, provide online training – see link here
Added to that, most local ambulance services will offer free training to a group of volunteers. You can find your local ambulance service email address here