Community Corner
Donations Fund New City Ambulance Corps' CPR Machine
They purchased the LUCAS 2 through fundraising
Each year the New City Ambulance Corps holds a fund drive seeking donations from the community, and last year when President Carol Ackerman wrote a letter detailing a new piece of equipment the hoped to buy, the community came through.
The corps collected more than $41,000 in donations, allowing them to buy a LUCAS 2 Chest Compression System machine.
“Out of the taxes, everybody gives $25 to the corps and our money comes from the town, but we don’t have extra money to buy things like this,” Ackerman said. “This piece of equipment is $13,000 and there’s a service contract for five years at $5,000, so it’s an $18,000 product plus extra batteries and everything else we need. We didn’t have the money in our budget for that and we did a fundraiser letter back in the fall and described this piece of equipment to our community and what it does and everyone was so generous.”
With the extra money raised, Ackerman said they might look into buying a second machine, as while one team is out on a call, a second one frequently comes in.
The machine hooks the patient onto a backboard and has a suction cup that hangs down from the top of the machine that attaches to the patient’s chest. The machine then performs CPR on the patient, either continuously or for 30 pumps and then stops, allowing the patient to breathe.
“In addition to providing perfect CPR, the machine also does not tire. Where a human can really do effective CPR for about two minutes, this machine can do it continuously for 45 without a break, so it’s much better for the patient,” said 1st Lieutenant Chris Williams, who is also the captain-elect of the department. “Also, we have to do CPR compressions until we can get to the hospital and turn it over to the ER staff, so we can wind up doing compressions a half hour, 40 minutes or more, and we have to do compressions while we’re in the moving ambulance. This will allow us to continue compressions and let the crew seatbelt themselves in so it’s much safer for the crew and also it frees up our hands and we’re allowed to go ahead and handle other aspects of patient care. It’s overall better for the patient and it’s much safer and better for the crew.”
Ackerman said the emergency staff at Nyack Hospital are also big fans of the machine, and said an instance in which the machine can come in handy is if someone has a heart attack in the bathroom, a fairly common occurrence, she said. Many times when this happens, the person will fall off the toilet and get wedged between the toilet and wall.
She said that once the patient is out from between the toilet and wall, it’s still difficult to perform CPR in a bathroom, but with the LUCAS the crew can start CPR there while loading the patient onto a stretcher, into an ambulance and on the way to the hospital.
“The whole time they’ll have effective CPR the entire time, and that is something we cannot provide without this equipment,” she said.
While they haven’t had to use the machine yet while out on a call, Ackerman said everyone in the department has been trained on it, and they would not have been able to get it without the people in the community.
“This is really a gift,” Ackerman said. “This is a lifesaving piece of equipment and we’re very grateful to our community, who donated the money to able to buy it.”
