Emergency officer charged with training for new safety equipment

allison martens

Concordia just increased its heart-smart quotient with the purchase of 11 automatic external defibrillators (AEDs).

A defibrillator is a device that is placed on the chest of someone who has gone into cardiac arrest. It is able to assess whether the heart has established an abnormal rhythm, and if so, delivers a mild electric shock to get it back on track.

“In laymen’s terms, it delivers a slap to the face to the heart: It says ‘Hey, let’s get organized here and establish a regular rhythm,” said Darren Dumoulin, Concordia’s Senior Advisor in Emergency Management.

“If you have ever been to a place like Chicago’s O’Hare airport, you can’t walk a minute in any direction without running into one of these.”

That’s because of their life-saving potential. If defibrillation is performed within the first ten minutes of cardiac arrest, the victim’s chances of survival increase up to 30 per cent.

“If it’s within the first four minutes, their chances of survival are even more elevated than that,” Dumoulin said.

Eight of the compact, portable devices will be used exclusively by security on both campuses. They are usually the first to arrive at the scene of a medical emergency on campus and are trained as first responders.

Defibrillator training for security officers will start by mid-May, and Dumoulin expects the devices to come into use in June. The program has the full support of Urgences Santé.

The other three will be for public use in the Loyola Athletics Complex, the new gym slated to open in the EV Building and in Samuel Bronfman House.

Once activated, the device provides step-by-step instructions via voice command that will help anyone who might have to use it to assist a victim of sudden cardiac arrest. If warranted, it can also provide instructions on how to perform CPR.

“I gave it to my 10-year-old son, and he was able to follow the protocol without any prompting from me,” Dumoulin said.

Dumoulin is the only person working in a Quebec university whose full-time occupation is emergency management. Before his appointment as Concordia’s senior advisor on that subject last October, he worked in the university’s security office for 12 years, most recently as operations manager. He is also a part-time firefighter in the South Shore community of La Prairie.

“Our office does contingency planning for an incident that could impact the university and how it manages and responds to any critical emergency on campus,” he said. This includes preparations that cover scenarios from ice-storm calibre weather to fires and pandemics.

Approximately 300 members of the university community are volunteers for the Concordia Emergency Response Team (CERT) and are certified first responders. According to Dumoulin, the Quebec government requires that one in every 50 employees have first aid training for emergency situations.

“The government requires training in first aid/CPR, but we also train them in fire safety, extinguishing, building evacuation and now with the defibrillators.”

For more information about the CERT program, email darren.dumoulin@concordia.ca