Cade Lucas
Kingsville is at the heart of efforts to improve cardiac outcomes in Maribyrnong and the inner-west.
The suburb has officially been named a Heart Safe community by Ambulance Victoria and the Heart Foundation, meaning it will be subject to an education, training and awareness campaign aimed at lowering the rate of heart disease and cardiac arrests occurring there.
“Essentially, the purpose of the program is we identify an area with poor cardiac outcomes, and we try to uplift the community,” said Ambulance Victoria’s community engagement liaison co-ordinator Katie Cornelius.
“We selected Kingsville because it’s within the Maribyrnong LGA and had an appropriate population size,” she said, pointing out that neighbouring suburbs were too big for the program to be effective.
According to the data collected by the Heart Foundation, Maribyrnong has some of the worst cardiac outcomes in Melbourne and it’s hoped that by designating Kingsville a heart safe community, improvements in heart health will spread through the rest of the municipality.
Ms Cornelius said the key to achieving this was putting 10 per cent of Kingsville’s population through the call, push and shock course.
“What that’s about is about helping Victorians to feel confident to act in an emergency setting when someone experiences cardiac arrest,” she said of the course where people learn how to call an ambulance, push on the patients chest and perform CPR and shock through the use of an automated external defibrillator, or AED.
Ms Cornelius said in the event of a cardiac arrest, where the heart completely stops, having access to an AED and knowing how to use one was especially important.
“53 per cent of cardiac arrest patients survived when first shocked by a public AED,” she said, adding that increasing the amount of AED’s registered with Ambulance Victoria was a key goal of the heart safe program and that Kingsville only having one was part of the reason it was selected.
“If people can register their AED with Ambulance Victoria, it means that the triple-0 call taker will be able to tell someone where an AED is in an emergency and (how to) actually apply it and use it in that emergency.”
Details: www.ambulance.vic.gov.au/community/community-partnerships/heart-safe-communities/
