Ambulance Driver

An Automatic External Defibrillator (AED), pictured left,  is a life-saving tool that   is  becoming  common place in today’s society. They have a proven track record for delivering  definitive care for those who have suffered a cardiac arrest. They are light weight, very simple to use (they talk to you), and provide the treatment of choice in a large number of cardiac arrest states. These things save lives.

Unfortunately, the United States Postal Service can’t seem to get its bureaucracy to approve the installation of an AED that is going to be donated to its downtown Minneapolis facility.

As the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports today, it has been 7 months since a worker at the facility died as a result of a cardiac arrest. Since then, his co-workers have tried in vain to get the upper-echelon paper pushers to approve their request – even though one is being donated.

Sure, the Post Office spokesman had a myriad of excuses:

“We can’t just make a local decision,” Nowacki said. “There are processes and things like that within the Postal Service.”

That was spoken like a true Government worker, don’t you think?

The article goes on to say that the spokesman denied the urgency of the request, in part due to the 4 minute response time of the paramedics from Hennepin County Medical Center.

I’ve responded to the downtown post office numerous times. As the workers attest in the article, it is a vast space. Their assertion that it actually took 13 minutes for the medics to arrive at the side of the patient does not surprise me a bit. Having an AED at the patient’s side immediately is much preferable to having to wait for me to show up.

And the spokesman just couldn’t stop digging:

Nowacki said the Postal Service couldn’t move forward, however, until the facility first updated its CPR certification. That process was completed Dec. 1, so a formal request will go to regional headquarters in the next few days, he said.

Nowacki estimated the facility would need 15 defibrillators, and that any decision to employ them must fit in with the “overall safety program” for 14,000 local postal employees.

When you go to the airport, the malls, the skyways or hundreds of other places where you see AED’s, you are not going to see a sign which says “DO NOT USE UNLESS YOU ARE CERTIFIED IN CPR.” As stated before, these machines are fool-proof. As long as you get the lid open, you’re home free. It starts talking to you and gives very simple instructions. Any moron can use one of these things.

They also assert that they need 15 devices. Well, knock yourself out. Go ahead, if you think you must. But that does not preclude placing ONE in a central location where everyone could know where it is.  I bet you could even get a couple of employees to mount it on the wall for you free of charge – except I’m sure there are regulations about that as well.

Well, anyway, I suppose the Postal Service employees can expect to see their new AED sometime in the next couple of years. Meanwhile let’s salute a group of federal workers who are trying like hell to do the right thing.

I Blame Bush