Canberra Puts Defibrillators in Every Suburb This Year

Rory Pittman was playing basketball with friends when his heart suddenly stopped. He was 16 years old.

The teenager collapsed on the Queanbeyan basketball courts last year during what seemed like an ordinary night. Quick-thinking bystanders and nurses at the game grabbed the court's Automated External Defibrillator and restarted his heart before paramedics arrived.

"Without the availability of the AED, we wouldn't have our boy anymore," says Michael Pittman, Rory's father. He received a phone call that night from a witness who could only say "I don't know" when asked if his son was okay.

The Pittmans were lucky. Sudden cardiac arrest kills 26,000 Australians every year, roughly 70 people daily. The survival rate sits below 10 percent, but early defibrillation can increase survival chances by five times or more.

That's why Canberra is rolling out publicly accessible AEDs to every single residential suburb by December. St John Ambulance ACT is partnering with Goodloop Mutual and StreetBeat to install 124 devices across the city. Forty-seven are already in place.

"Which may well make Canberra one of the world's first cities to have a publicly accessible lifesaving defibrillator in every suburb," says Martin Fisk, chief executive of St John Ambulance ACT.

The Ripple Effect

The devices are designed for anyone to use, even without training. Users simply press a button and the machine provides vocal instructions for every step, from calling emergency services to administering shocks. The AEDs only work during actual cardiac arrest and include GPS trackers to prevent theft.

St John Ambulance hopes to train 2,500 Canberrans annually in emergency response. "Anything you can do as a bystander is better than nothing," Fisk says.

Rory has fully recovered and continues playing the same sports he loved before, though doctors never identified what caused his cardiac arrest. Now he volunteers with St John Ambulance as a cadet, helping others the way strangers helped him.

His father's wish came true: it won't be a matter of luck anymore.